Praise for the New Thriller Master Leo J. Maloney

“From the bloody, ripped-from-the-headlines opening sequence, Silent Assassin grabs you and doesn’t let go. Silent Assassin has everything a thriller reader wants—nasty villains, twists and turns, and a hero, Cobra, who just plain kicks ass.”

—Ben Coes, national bestselling author of The Last Refuge

“Silent Assassin is a terrifyingly thrilling story of a man on a clandestine mission to save us all from a madman hellbent on murder, written by a man who knows that world all too well.”

—Michele McPhee, award-winning author of A Mob Story

“Leo J. Maloney is the new voice to be reckoned with. Every word of Termination Orders rings with the authenticity that can only come from an insider. This is one outstanding thriller!”

—John Gilstrap, New York Times bestselling author of Damage Control

“Taut, tense and terrifying! You’ll cross your fingers it’s fiction—in this high-powered action-packed thriller, Leo Maloney proves he clearly knows his stuff.”

—Hank Phillippi Ryan, Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity winning author

“A new must-read action thriller that features a double-crossing CIA and Congress, vengeful foreign agents, a corporate drug ring, the Taliban, and narco-terrorists . . . a you-are-there account of torture, assassination, and double-agents, where ‘nothing is as it seems.’ ”

—Jon Renaud, author of Dereliction of Duty

“Leo J. Maloney is a real-life Jason Bourne.”

—Josh Zwylen, Wicked Local Stoneham

“A masterly blend of Black Ops intrigue, cleverly interwoven with imaginative sequences of fiction.

The reader must guess which accounts are real and which are merely storytelling.”

—Chris Treece, The Chris Treece Show

“A deep ops story presented in an epic style that takes fact mixed with a bit of fiction to create a spy thriller that takes the reader deep into secret spy missions.”

—Cy Hilterman, Best Sellers World

“For fans of spy thrillers seeking a bit of realism mixed into their novels, Termination Orders will prove to be an excellent and recommended pick.”

—Midwest Book Review

ALSO BY LEO J. MALONEY

Termination Orders

SILENT ASSASSIN

LEO J. MALONEY

PINNACLE BOOKS

Kensington Publishing Corp.

www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

Praise for the New Thriller Master Leo J. Maloney

ALSO BY LEO J. MALONEY

Title Page

Dedication

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Teaser chapter

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Copyright Page

This book is dedicated to all the brave men and women who serve in the armed forces and put their lives on the line, with many making the ultimate sacrifice so that we have the freedoms we enjoy.

I also dedicate this book to my parents, Leo and Marguerite Maloney, who encouraged me to trust my instincts and supported all my decisions as a young adult. I miss you every day.

PROLOGUE

Paris, December 14

At 8:22, the train headed toward La Défense began pulling in to the platform at the bustling Metro station of Châtelet-Les Halles, located right in the heart of old Paris. Bright fluorescent lights illuminated the white-tiled arch of the tunnel and the throng of people who stood waiting, windswept in the air displaced by the incoming train. The crowd, typical of the French capital, was a heterogeneous mixture of races and cultures: along with the European-descended Parisians were descendants of Algerian immigrants, dark-skinned sub-Saharan Africans in colorful flowing garb, Japanese businessmen in fussed-over grey suits and young Scandinavians, coming in red-faced from the cold, wearing oversized backpacks on their backs. As the passengers on the platform heard the whine of the approaching train, they crowded in close to the edge, and those who’d had the good fortune of finding seats against the subway walls had already stood up to board.

At 8:22, Auguste Lefevre, sleep-deprived, running late for work with a vomit stain on his shirt courtesy of his three-month-old and his suit jacket hanging from his bent arm, stumbled on to the platform, relieved at the first break he had caught that day by making this train.

At 8:22, on the first car of the train, Maureen Lipton wrangled a map of Paris on her husband Hal’s back, looking for the way to Rue Montorgueil as their red-haired ten-year-old Adam griped about being out of bed so early. They all had to grab the railing abruptly in order to keep from tumbling down as the train started to brake.

At 8:22, Henri, the sixty-six-year-old busker with wild grey hair and bulldog jowls fingered his accordion as he called out huskily to the young women who passed by, smiling at them with only half a mouthful of teeth.

And then, at 8:23, all hell broke loose.

The first bomb went off as soon as the train came to a standstill. It exploded at the far end of the platform, so that it was impossible to tell whether it had come with the train or been there all along. The scene after that was pandemonium. Deafening alarms went off, and then the sprinklers. The stampede began toward the far end of the platform, away from the smoldering metal on the train, the blackened floor, the seared flesh. In the train, people frantically banged against the unopened doors and scuttled toward the far end as smoke wafted from the first car down.

At that moment, the second bomb went off. It had been placed near the back end of the train, close to the platform stairs, and caught the crowd as they attempted to leave. Inchoate screams pierced the chaos—of terror, of pain, of grief, calling out for a missing child or parent or friend, and lone heroes doing what they could to shield the wounded or otherwise helpless from the human tide. The doors of the train wrenched open; people began to funnel out. The distant wail of sirens drew closer.

After a few minutes, the scene had practically cleared. What was left, under the drizzle of the sprinklers, were the train, both ends charred; the bodies of those who had been claimed by the explosions or trampled underfoot; and those who could not bear to leave their loved ones behind and cried desperately, holding their bodies. Just as inert as the dead was an accordion, bent and smashed, with half its keys broken off and scattered on the platform floor.

The bomb squad arrived first on the scene, six men in full protective gear, who analyzed the premises for any active threats. Once they had cleared the platform, it was mere minutes until it was swarming with police, fire, and ambulance personnel. They removed the survivors first, in a mad rush to reach the hospital before they expired, and then removed from the scene those who had lingered behind. Some forensic experts photographed the scene while others analyzed the blast sites and still others scoured the floor for evidence.

This was the scene that Bernard Chaput, from the terrorism department at the Direction Centrale du Ren-seignement Intérieur, the French intelligence agency, saw when he arrived at the train station. He surveyed the damage with horror, treading carefully on his polished black dress shoes so as not to interfere with any evidence. He asked several of the men working there for their preliminary opinions. He first made a call to his boss at the DCRI, filling him in with the details. Then he made another to someone a continent away, across the ocean.

CHAPTER 1

Washington, D.C., December 14

“So what have we got?”

William Schroeder’s voice came across as tired, mechanical and unceremonious. Philip Chapman—“Buck” to just about everyone who knew him—sat along with the rest of the Emergency Task Force in their conference room in the Pentagon, with its dark hardwood table, which was arrayed with telephones and Ethernet outlets and surrounded by ten chairs and blank monitors. The room was bare and sterile compared to Chapman’s situation room back at Langley, where he led a Crisis Response Team that he had personally handpicked. There, the walls were covered with clippings and photos forming complex diagrams, and boxes of takeout littered the floor, with none of the people on the team having had the time to stop and clean up in days. This was the kind of fancy, official room that Chapman had never gotten used to, where things were discussed but never done. Schroeder, who was a Section Chief at the DoD but was currently serving as Task Force Chair and Special Liaison to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commanded the head of the table. Chapman, as the principal CIA representative at the table, was at his left. Populating the other chairs were representatives from various other government agencies, from the FBI to the NSA.

Schroeder’s heavy brow was furrowed into a stony scowl, and he looked no one in the eye. His face was pale, with heavy, dark bags under his eyes, his shirt wrinkled and his collar undone. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, and all energy had been completely drained from him. Chapman could sympathize.

“Death toll is at thirty-two at the moment,” said Chapman, relating what his contact in the French Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence had reported. “Three Americans among them. Tourists on vacation. A couple with their young son.”

“Jesus,” said Schroeder. “I’ll let the Director of National Intelligence know. The President is going to want to mention them in his address to the nation. Do we have names for the family?”

“I’ll find out and make sure to send that along to you,” said Chapman.

Chapman’s exhaustion didn’t stem from the fact that he’d gotten pulled out of bed at 2:30 AM for this meeting; he was as used to being pulled out of bed at all hours as anyone who worked in foreign affairs. And it wasn’t his having to burn the midnight oil every night besides. No, it was the relentlessness of this crisis. Three months now since the first attack, since the New York – bound airplane had crashed in Atlanta, streaking across Interstate 20 minutes after taking off from Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. Everyone on board, a hundred and seven people, was dead, plus six more on the ground who had been in the path of the crash. Chapman remembered vividly where he had been, running on his treadmill and watching the morning news, when the announcement came. Along with probably most of the country, he had thought terrorists from the moment he’d heard about the disaster. After that, every hour that passed with no terrorist group taking credit for the attack was a relief. Horrible as it might have been, an accident was self-contained and its repercussions were limited. People would not have to live in fear of the next one. No wars would be launched because of mechanical failure. There was a cold comfort in that.

But then came the early forensic reports. The pilots and most of the passengers had been dead by the time the plane hit the ground. Toxicology screens had found that they had been poisoned with mustard gas. Hidden canisters had been found near the plane’s air filters. They had begun releasing their deadly payload into the cabin just moments after takeoff.

The Emergency Investigative Task Force, the group Chapman was sitting with right now, had been convened immediately. It had been bracing at first. Energizing. They had been full of righteous anger, and it was, in its own way, intoxicating. He remembered their first meeting. They had been ready—pumped even—to find the culprits and rain vengeance upon them. It was an energy that he brought back to his people at the CIA. But then, no one claimed responsibility. No indication that any of the usual suspects, domestic or foreign, had been involved. The chatter, of course, had recently escalated, and the anti-American message boards had been abuzz with activity. But intelligence agencies had been turning up nothing of value. Little by little, they ran out of places to look. Their intelligence resources exhausted themselves, and they were no closer to catching the culprits.

It made no sense. Armchair psychoanalyzing aside, terrorists did what they did for a political purpose. The point was to make it public. Why create terror but not tell people why? What was the reason?

Weeks after the crash, when they had been almost lulled into believing that the attack had been an isolated incident, perhaps a lone madman, it happened again. Three bombs in a coordinated attack in a trade fair in Barcelona this time. There was nothing to connect the two events, except the utter silence from the perpetrators. There were those who said they couldn’t possibly be related, that it had to be coincidence. And even Chapman had had his doubts. Until the bombs had gone off in the Port of Oslo.

The process had been constant stress and frustration for them. Their energy and anger had quickly seeped out of them. The strain had ground them all down to a hard kernel, wearing away all courtesies and politeness and leaving behind only a grim determination to see the task through.

And now another one. Christ.

“Tell me we’ve got something on whoever is behind this Paris bombing,” Schroeder demanded of the room. He scanned the people present, and downcast eyes gave him his answer. Schroeder cast a glance, and Chapman followed his eyes, to NSA liaison Dick Browning.

“Chatter’s through the roof, but we’ve still got no credible intel,” he said. “Our agency analysts are just sorting through it all at the moment. Lots of gloating and celebrating, but nothing actionable. I’ll be the first to tell once something of interest comes up.”

“What about forensics?”

“The French are playing this pretty close to the chest for now,” said Browning. “I think we’re going to have to wait—”

“They’re still combing the site,” Chapman cut in. ”But preliminary reports aren’t promising. The Paris bomb squad experts said there was nothing out of the ordinary about the explosives, at least at first glance. The devices were expertly built, no amateur work, but beyond that, nothing much. Absolutely no materials that might turn your head and no signature details.”

Schroeder cursed. “Nothing new then.”

“We should wait for the full reports, but—”

“Right,” said Schroeder. “We’ll manage our expectations on that. George, what’s your take?”

That was George Stanley, the group’s expert consultant on terrorism—the egghead. He was a professor type, balding, with long hair and a tweed jacket with shoulder pads. He spoke softly, at a high register and with a slight stammer that was made worse by the tension of the moment.

“W-well,” said Stanley, with as discouraging a tone as Schroeder had ever heard, “taking into account the p-precise location and nature of the attack—w-well, it fits no discernible pattern. At this juncture, there is nothing to tell us who might have done this.”

Well, there had been claims, of course. After the dead silence following the Barcelona attack, fledgling anti-Western terrorist groups had tripped over one another to claim responsibility. Even a couple of the big ones had gotten in the game. And meanwhile, whoever was really behind this was sitting quietly in the shadows, playing the greatest intelligence community in the world for fools.

“W-what remains is what we already knew,” continued Stanley. “The c-continued anonymity of the perpetrators tells us we’re not dealing with ordinary terrorists. Political terrorism hinges on the doers of the attack—and the m-motives behind it—being well publicized. All this mystery makes no sense at all, in that respect. The persistent silence after today’s attack tells us that this isn’t political, at least not in the ordinary sense. And with the g-goals still so obscure, we’re left knowing—”

“Precisely nothing,” cut in Schroeder. “Great. Anyone got anything else they need to share?” No one moved to speak. “Goddammit,” he said, slamming his fist into the table. “We reconvene in three hours. Find me something. Anything. Just do your goddamned jobs and get us something to go on. Go. Go!”

As they got up to leave, he said, “Buck, stay behind a minute. I gotta talk to you.”

Chapman waited as the others shuffled out. When they were alone, Schroeder sat across from him and looked him straight in the eye. “I’ve got to talk to the Joint Chiefs, and I want your honest opinion. How likely are we to come up with anything actionable on this?”

Chapman frowned. He wasn’t scared of Schroeder, and if he was worth anything, he wouldn’t be the kind of person who would beat around the bush and tell half-truths to cover his own ass. That was the only reason he was sitting in this room. “Not very. Whoever is behind this is as professional as they come. Expert at covering their tracks. We can hope that they’ll make a mistake, but that’s all that is: hope.”

“That’s what you got? Hope?” said Schroeder in a voice laden with anger. “Hope gets us all of nothing. People are scared. And they’re right to be. They should be terrified. It’s gonna happen again, and who’s to say it won’t happen on American soil again next time?”

“Not us, that’s for damn sure,” said Chapman ruefully.

Schroeder stared intensely at Chapman. “I know you have contacts, Buck,” he said in a low voice. “You’ve delved much deeper into the intelligence rabbit hole than me or anyone else in this group.”

Chapman looked at Schroeder, taken aback. He was right, of course. Chapman had worked in extralegal intelligence for over ten years, collecting information from sources that ranged from shady to outright criminal. He often tapped in to his eyes and ears in the underworld—it was what made him such an asset. But this time, even in the criminal underworld, all he’d heard was crickets. “I’ve exhausted all the resources that I had in this, Bill,” he said. “I’ve done everything I can.”

“Don’t give me that crap,” said Schroeder. “It’s time to pull out all the stops, Buck. This cannot go on. Not on our watch.”

“Jesus, Bill, what do you think I’ve been doing for the past—”

“Do more,” said Schroeder. “The lines you wouldn’t cross before? It’s time to cross them. Do you understand what I’m saying, Buck?”

“I do,” said Chapman, his heart sinking.

He left the situation room with his mind a jumble of thoughts and misgivings. There were lines he hadn’t crossed, had told himself he wouldn’t cross. He knew that some doors, once opened, couldn’t be shut again. But what was he supposed to do? How could he hold anything back in a situation like this? And now Schroeder was pushing him as well.

Chapman walked out into the parking lot to make the fifteen-minute drive back to CIA Headquarters. He called his second-in-command at the CIA Crisis Response Team, Cynthia Gillespie.

“Talk to me, Cyn.”

“Waiting on updates from Paris, Buck. Just like when you last called, twenty minutes ago. I told you, if something turns up, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Make sure to do that,” he said.

“Are you coming back now?” she asked.

“I just have to make one quick stop.”

Chapman hung up. As he drove listlessly down the George Washington Memorial Parkway, he wondered how fast he could get ahold of a secure phone line.

CHAPTER 2

Budapest, December 27

“I’m here to see Roman Lubarsky.”

The voice was self-assured, brash even; if the accent had not given away that he was not from Budapest, but rather from America, then surely the characteristic lack of subtlety would have been plenty to identify the nationality of the speaker.

“I’m afraid Mr. Lubarsky isn’t seeing anyone at the moment, sir,” said the girl at the hardwood and brass reception desk, offering him a “what-can-you-do?” shrug and a practiced look of commiseration from across the counter, and motioning him out of the wood-paneled, red-carpeted foyer into the brisk grey morning.

“Oh, I think he’s going to want to see me,” the man said, then grinned. She did not smile back at his comment. He was approaching middle age, but still handsome in that rough American way, with a chiseled jaw, a full head of dark hair with grey streaks, and a trim mustache with a goatee. He was not tall, but had broad shoulders that were emphasized by his grey pinstripe suit. He had an expensive-looking black leather briefcase in his right hand, which she had noticed when he’d walked into the lobby. She had also noticed that he was unusually fit and vigorous. The kind of man who could cause a lot of trouble if he wanted to—of one kind and the other, she couldn’t help thinking, looking him up and down. She shut those thoughts out. She had to look at him as a security risk and nothing more, and those thoughts only compounded the danger. Under his suit jacket she could see a well-concealed gun holster. Barely perceptible, but it was the kind of thing she was paid to notice.

She could tell she wouldn’t get rid of him easily, but this wasn’t the first person who had insisted on coming in off the street to see the boss. He was definitely not the first one who had come in packing heat. But she knew how to deal with this type.

“Mr. Lubarsky does not receive anyone without an appointment,” she told him. She leaned in closer, resting her weight on her right elbow on the counter, as if to say something confidential, just between him and her. “Trust me, sir,” she said. “It will do no good to insist.” As she spoke, she reached down discreetly with her right hand and pushed the tiny button hidden on the underside of the counter.

“I’ve got a standing appointment with Lubarsky,” said the man coolly.

“It’s not in my book,” she said, pointing at the leather-bound planner and shrugging to signal her utter incapacity to do anything about this situation.

“Oh, I think he’s going to want to see me anyway.”

This was getting tiresome. Her tone took on an edge of annoyance. “I insist, sir, that even if you are His Holiness the Pope himself, Mr. Lubarsky will not—” She was interrupted as Marko and Lyudmil emerged from the louvre door next to the reception desk and flanked the American. She couldn’t help grinning slightly as the balance of power shifted in her favor, and became altogether less subtle.

“This guy giving you trouble, Rositsa?”

“Some men just can’t take no for an answer,” she said, teasing the man by looking straight into his eyes as she spoke. She loved having the muscle behind her.

The man did not stop smiling. “Some men just know when not to fold.”

“Come on, asshole,” said Lyudmil, grabbing the man’s left arm. “The lady has had enough of you.”

The American, totally unfazed, did not move. Instead, he reached into his breast pocket. The two men seemed alarmed by the gesture and began to move to restrain him, but relaxed when they saw him pulling out a business card. The American proffered it to them, holding it between two outstretched fingers. Marko took it, examined it, and then handed it to Lyudmil. They nodded between them.

“Please follow us this way, sir,” said Marko. “We apologize on behalf of the girl. Mr. Lubarsky will see you very soon.”

The three disappeared into the louvre door into the employees-only area of the ground floor. The girl from reception looked down and the counter and saw that they had left the card. She picked it up and looked at it curiously. On it was no name—in fact, no words at all. All there was on the rich white stock was a simple black ink drawing of a snake, a cobra, coiled and ready to strike.

CHAPTER 3

Budapest, December 27

Dan Morgan, Code Name Cobra, was taken into a back room of the lobby of the Sárkány, where the bare concrete walls and fluorescent lighting stood in stark contrast to the elegant wood paneling and soft, old-world incandescents of reception. There was no stage dressing here, just the bare essentials. He had been led there by the two hulking grunts in black suits who had come, originally, to kick him out and maybe leave him in the back alley with a couple of cracked ribs and internal bleeding. Instead, they were taking him to their boss.

One of the two, tall and broad-shouldered with a jutting chin, scowled down at him while the other, a squat and wide man who might have been mistaken by an ape if he weren’t wearing such a dapper suit, tried to take his Walther. No guns in the hotel, he said, though of course he meant no guns that weren’t in their possession.

“The gun stays with me,” said Morgan.

“Are we going to have to take it away from you?” said the tall one.

“From my cold dead hands.”

“You do not let us have the gun, you do not see Mr. Lubarsky.”

“You can tell Lubarsky that if he wants to see me, he’d best not take my gun away. Consider it a token of good faith on his part.”

The two looked at each other, and then at him like they wanted to take turns wringing his neck. Then the short, squat one picked up the phone and exchanged a few words with Lubarsky, presumably, on the other end. Then he hung up and said to Morgan, “He will allow you to carry your gun upstairs.”

“How gracious of him,” said Morgan.

“Any funny business,” he said, “and you leave this hotel in little tiny pieces, is it clear?”

“Crystal.”

They x-rayed his briefcase, scanned him for bugs, and then escorted him back to the lobby. Then they ushered him to an elevator that they opened with a key. The interior was red-carpeted and wood-paneled to match the lobby, and it had only two floor buttons, unmarked. The short one turned another key and pressed the top button.

The elevator was not large, and Morgan was wedged uncomfortably between the two guards. The cabin began its ascent, the movement imperceptible but for a gentle tug at Morgan’s gut and at the Samsonite he held in his right hand.

The elevator stopped as discreetly as it had started, after what seemed like not enough time to cover the necessary distance. The doors slid open, right into the penthouse foyer.

The first thing to hit him was the smell. It was a heady mixture of stale vomit, food fresh and rotting, alcohol, and sweat mingled with a few other bodily odors. Obscene squeals and moans from a pornographic movie emanated into the foyer, and it seemed like a very appropriate soundtrack. The room was decorated in the most expensive poor taste achievable. He briefly wondered how much worse the décor would seem to his wife Jenny’s professional eye—only a fleeting thought, before his mind began to formulate his reaction in case things took a turn for the worse.

It was automatic, part of his training. Possibilities played in his head in short clips of sudden violence. The bigger one would go down with a well-placed elbow to the nose; that would be enough to knock him out. He’d likely draw his gun for the other, but he could not count on doing it fast enough, and might have to improvise. Morgan’s training and experience gave him a keen sense of his environment, and this one provided more than enough for him to work with: here a bronze bust of Elvis that could easily crack open a man’s skull, there a gold-framed mirror whose shards could slice open a carotid in a pinch.

A guttural voice spoke from the next room, in Russian. The short one responded in kind, and Morgan made out, in his speech, the word “Cobra.” The man in the other room responded.

“Go on,” said the short one thickly. “He is waiting.”

Morgan stepped through a columned arch, and the scene that had been only suggested by the acrid and intensifying smell appeared before him, inspiring in him alternately nausea and rage. The Sárkány was elegant and expensive, and the penthouse, on a good day, was by far the best in the hotel. But whatever class the place might have had was subsumed into the filth of the man he had come to see.

“Lubarsky.”

“Merry Christmas, Mr. Cobra!” said Lubarsky jovially. “Please, call me Roman. Have a drink. Make yourself at home.”

Empty bottles of top-shelf champagne and vodka lay strewn about along with two upturned velvet-upholstered chairs. Slumped on the bed, half-covered by a stained white sheet, was a woman who wouldn’t have looked out of place on a high-fashion runway. Her head lay slack on the bed, her white-blond hair hanging off its side, her eyes eerily blank. Another woman, black with high cheekbones and wearing mussed up lingerie, was huddled over an end table from which she had pushed off a wrought iron lamp. She was frantically cutting with a razor at a small mound of cocaine. Victims of human trafficking, most likely. Morgan knew what women went through to become playthings for the rich and unscrupulous. It disgusted him and made him wish he could kill Lubarsky right then.

“I think I’ll call you Lubarsky,” said Morgan.

The man himself was naked, rolls of flesh pendent between his open legs, his back hair so thick he might as well have been wearing a sweater. Greasy black locks clung to the sweat on his forehead and his tiny eyes were open wide, red and manic, with pupils so dilated that they almost reached the outer edges of the iris.

“Do you want to tell me how long you’ve been on this bender?” Morgan asked.

“I take it that’s my money in that suitcase?” He snorted.

“Answer the damn question, Lubarsky.”

The Georgian looked at him with murder in his eyes. No ego like that of a successful arms dealer. “Are you telling me what to do in my own hotel?”

“You and I have things to do today, and I want to know that you’re in good goddamn shape to perform.”

Lubarsky looked at him as if he were about to lunge for his throat, then burst into a hacking, hoarse laugh. “Why all business, Cobra? Sit down. Have some cocaine. Have a whore. I just got these two fresh from a new shipment.” He looked at the woman who had been huddled over the table snorting coke. “You! Come here.”

She did her best to slink over, stumbling over a stray shoe.

“What is your name, sugar?” asked Lubarsky.

“My name is anything you want, baby.” She spoke in a lewd, sedated tone, rendered especially cartoonish by her heavy accent. There was no emotion in her red, heavy-lidded eyes.

“Ha ha, you see, they are well trained.”

“I’ll pass,” said Morgan.

“Are you sure?” Morgan scowled at him. “Fine, fine. You are a modest man. I cannot say I understand. But suit yourself.” He waved absently at the woman, and she stumbled away. “Have a drink then. I have a single malt from the highlands—”

“I don’t drink.”

Lubarsky laughed his hideous laugh again and it made Morgan want to break his nose. “That’s the trouble with you assassin types. Always with the discipline. You make obscene amounts of money, but you never do anything obscene with it!”

“I hear Novokoff can really put away the vodka.”

“Yes, true,” he said, laughing. “But that is like milk of his mother to Novokoff. He has the resistance of an ox. It doesn’t count as debauchery if he does not become drunk.”

“Speaking of the devil—”

“Yes, yes, I have not forgotten the business, Cobra. Your end first.”

Morgan pushed aside a bottle and set down the briefcase on the table in front of Lubarsky.

“It’s all in there,” he said.

Lubarsky opened it and looked through the stacks of bills inside, a smile widening on his face.

“You are a man of your word, Cobra.”

Morgan wasn’t interested in compliments. “Novokoff?”

“It is set up for today, like we discussed.”

“Where?”

Lubarsky snorted. “He will not say until we are on the road. He is a paranoid bastard.”

“I’m guessing he learned it the hard way,” said Morgan. “Twenty years in the KGB will do that to a man. You don’t get to be his age in this business without a healthy paranoia.”

“And your side of the bargain?”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it. All loaded up in a freezer truck and ready to go wherever he is,” said Morgan.

Lubarsky grinned his hideous yellow grin. “I tell you, Cobra, you are in the wrong business. This high-tech junk—biological weapons and nerve gas and smart bombs—they are crap business. All the special transportation, the lack of supply. And it’s all middlemen, middlemen, middlemen. Never a direct sale. The percentage is shit. The good business is in selling Kalashnikovs and grenades to African warlords. Get paid in diamonds, and no fucking middlemen.”

“But you’re still gracing us with your presence today, Lubarsky?” said Morgan.

Lubarsky laughed. “I am making an introduction. Whole other animal. Little exposure, cash up front. Plus,” he added, “for Novokoff, I do this.”

“How sweet of you.”

“It is good for business. Not to mention, I’m scared shitless of the bastard.” He seemed serious all of a sudden. “You do not mess this up, you hear me, Cobra?”

“You’re telling me? Screw you, Lubarsky. Are you even planning on putting on some goddamn clothes?”

Lubarsky laughed. “You know, I like you, Cobra. I believe this is—how do you say?—the start of a wonderful friendship.”

Morgan looked at him disdainfully and hoped powerfully that he might have the opportunity to kill this man before this was over.

CHAPTER 4

Budapest, December 27

Dr. Eugenia Barrett, Zeta Division’s own engineering wiz, opened the metal crate slowly and deliberately, and a thin mist poured out from inside, like a liquid overflowing over the lip of a glass. Morgan crouched for a better look and ran his hand along the flowing mist. It felt cold to the touch. The crate itself was a reinforced metal cube that stood about waist high, sitting strapped into the back of a small refrigerated truck. Morgan looked inside, and the mist slowly dispersed to reveal four rows of metal cylinders.

“This is the real thing,” said Barrett. “A tiny whiff of this stuff will kill a grown man in forty seconds. Same if you get any on your skin. Violent convulsions, projectile vomiting.” She was speaking in a tone that was a disconcerting mixture of pride and fascination. “The good news is you probably wouldn’t be conscious for most of it.”

“Yeah, I got the CliffsNotes stateside,” said Morgan, shuddering. He looked down at the sixteen canisters, the mist from the refrigeration still playing around them. He had lost count of how many times he had been close to death in his life, but few dangers even came close to the chilling prospect of being killed by nerve gas.

“I’d say that, in this case, you could use the refresher.” She gestured toward the canisters, each of which was about as tall as a fire extinguisher, though about half as thick. They were made of polished metal, rendered cloudy by a thin layer of frozen condensation. “To remove a canister,” she said, as she put on heavy temperature-resistant gloves, “you twist, then pull.” With gloved hands, she gripped one corner canister, turned it a hundred and eighty degrees, and pulled. “Why don’t you put on your gloves and hold this, so you can see what it feels like?”

He put on the gloves she had given him, and then took it with nervous but steady hands. He could feel the cold of the metal even through the gloves, and wondered what it would feel like to touch it with bare hands. “It’s surprisingly light,” he said.

“Titanium,” she said. “We’re not taking any chances.”

He examined the canister. There was a green light on the top surface, which indicated the integrity of the container. The sides were mostly featureless, except for the locking mechanism toward the bottom, and one round hole about three quarters of the way up with a mechanism for attaching a hose.

“Put it back so you can see how it’s done,” said Barrett.

He inserted the canister in the slot as gently as possible, and then turned it until he heard a satisfying mechanical click. He then helped Barrett put the lid back on the crate.

She climbed down from the back of the truck, and Morgan followed her, being careful as he touched his right foot to the ground. He was slightly relieved not to feel any pain in his knee.

Barrett noticed. “Got yourself a gimpy leg there, do you?” she asked.

“Old battle wound.” He shrugged. “Flares up now and then.”

The two of them were in a mostly empty loading dock on the edge of Budapest. Lubarsky was waiting in a car outside with the two bodyguards from the hotel. His companion, Eugenia Barrett, was a slight woman with close-cropped hair, pretty in an unconventional, boyish sort of way. She was no older than thirty, a, clever fast-talking science prodigy with no ear for social graces. Her disregard not only for the regular niceties, but also the cautions and concerns of normality, seemed to make her particularly well-suited to clandestine work. That, along with her directness, had made Morgan like her right away.

“The one upside,” she continued, as they walked to a workstation she had set up in a corner, “is that the half-life for this baby is only about a minute in the atmosphere.” Half-life referred to the time it took for half of the gas to lose its potency. “If there’s any kind of leak, hold your breath and get the hell out of there.” She picked up a syringe in a hermetic plastic sheath that had been left out on the table. “You’ll still absorb the gas through your skin, but you just might make it if you inject yourself with this.” She held out the syringe for him.

Morgan saw the size of the needle, and his knees became suddenly unsteady. His nervousness must have shown, because Barrett asked, gently mocking, “Oh, is someone scared of needles?”

“I just don’t like them, all right?” he said, irritated at his own embarrassment.

“What is this anyway, some kind of antidote?” he said, examining the clear contents of the syringe.

“Atropine. It’ll counteract the effects of the gas. Plunge that son of a bitch right in your heart, and it could save your life.”

“My heart?” He stared at the three-inch-long needle. He wondered if he’d be able to do it if and when the chips were down. “Remind me, Genie,” he said, “why we’re not giving this bastard a goddamn decoy?”

She shrugged. “I wish we could. But if this Novokoff is half as competent as he’s supposed to be, he’ll make damn sure he gets what he’s paying for. And if he finds out we’ve filled these canisters with weapons-grade air, the whole operation is blown.”

“That fail-safe had better work then,” he said, still staring warily at the needle.

“Don’t worry. I designed the system myself. We tested the hell out of those incinerators. One in each canister, well-hidden inside the cooling mechanism. They’re on timer and remote control, and there’s enough thermite in each canister to melt a new hole in an Eskimo’s ass.”

“Just take care that it doesn’t melt mine,” he said wryly. He tucked the syringe into one of his breast pockets.

Barrett laughed. “Don’t worry, Cobes. If everything goes according to plan, you’ll be gone and he’ll be captured before long before that timer goes off.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

She shrugged.

“That’s reassuring,” he said. But the plan was as solid as it was going to get. Risk was the name of the game, and he’d been in Black Ops long enough to know how it was played.

“Looks like we’re about ready on this end. All you need now is the okay from number one.”

Barrett bent down to type at a laptop that was set up on one corner of the table. After a few seconds, there appeared on the screen the familiar face of a woman: mid-forties, with chin-length straight brown hair, steely blue eyes on a stern heart-shaped face that narrowed to a pointed chin and was lined with years of worry. Diana Bloch, supreme leader of Zeta Division, who was coordinating and heading this entire operation.

“Morgan,” came Bloch’s voice over the computer. “What’s the status?”

“It’s all in position and waiting for the go-ahead,” he said. “Lubarsky came through. He’s waiting outside, and he’ll have the location for us when we’re ready.”

“Good,” she said. “Remember, we can’t risk Novokoff catching you with any kind of radio transmitter, which means you can’t have any kind of wire or tracker. Bishop is standing by with the tactical team. They’re going to do whatever they can to keep visual contact with you at all times, and we’ll have satellite coverage as well.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Got this all during the mission brief.”

“I just wanted to remind you that you’re not alone out there.”

“Appreciated,” he said.

“We need to get this guy, Morgan. He’s the only lead we have for these events. Failure is not an option.”

“Never is. Is the mission go?”

“The mission is go,” she said. “Godspeed, Morgan. And safe return.”

The screen went blank. He heard a long beep of a horn coming from Lubarsky’s car outside.

“Your date’s getting impatient,” Barrett said.

“Screw him,” he said. Then he called out, “Ferenc? Are you ready?”

The tall, blond Hungarian with a youthful rectangular face appeared from a side door. “Are we set to go, Cobra?” he asked, twirling the keys to the truck in his hand.

“We are,” he said.

“Ready to bag us a weapons dealer?” he said, excited as he strapped on his shoulder holster.

“I’m glad you’re so chipper about this,” said Morgan, checking his own Walther. “Is Bishop ready?”

“They’re in position at a safe house a few blocks away,” said Ferenc.

Morgan climbed into the passenger side of the truck while Ferenc got in the driver’s seat. Ferenc turned the key, and after whining the engine rumbled awake. Morgan opened his window.

“You’re all set, Cobes,” said Barrett with a smirk. She then walked to the garage door control. “Try not to get killed.”

“Thanks for the advice. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“All right, Morgan. Break a leg.” She pulled the switch, and the garage door started rolling up. She winced as the cold air rushed in, carrying with it flurries of snow.

“I’m trying to avoid bodily injury, thank you very much.” Morgan squinted at the daylight pouring in.

CHAPTER 5

Budapest, December 27

The truck emerged from the garage. As his eyes adjusted to the light, Morgan saw Lubarsky huddled next to his bodyguards and leaning against his black town car, arms crossed and looking pissed off.

“We’re here,” called Morgan through the truck’s open window.

“Yes, I can see,” said the Georgian snippily. “About goddamn time. I am freezing my nuts off out here.” He typed into his burner cell phone.

“I thought you assholes were supposed to be used to the cold,” said Morgan. “Or at least not whine like a little girl about it.”

“Come here,” said Lubarsky, grabbing his crotch, “and I’ll show you little girl.” Lubarsky’s phone beeped, and he looked at the screen. Moran just stared at Lubarsky and thought to himself, I’d love to rip your throat out, you fat, disgusting pig.

“Okay, I have the location of the meeting. It is a long drive. I take it you want to ride with the merchandise?”

“You take it right,” said Morgan.

“Okay,” said Lubarsky. “Follow us.”

He got into the back of the car, with the bodyguards in front. They set off, and Ferenc followed.

“So how do we do this?” asked Ferenc as he drove.

“You hang back,” said Morgan. “Near the truck—remember, you’re just the driver. Keep a close eye on the situation and your weapon at the ready. If everything goes according to plan, this should be just like a real arms deal. We make the trade, they leave with the gas, and as far as we’re concerned, that’s it for us. So for all intents and purposes, we are real arms dealers.”

“And if it doesn’t go according to plan?”

“Then you come save my ass,” said Morgan.

They drove in silence behind Lubarsky for a few minutes, passing rows and rows of suburban homes.

“Forgive me for the intrusion,” said Ferenc, breaking the silence, “but you strike me as an intelligence type, am I right?”

Morgan didn’t like the question. They weren’t supposed to know much about each other. The more the other man knew about him, the more he could give up under duress. And it went both ways: as far as Morgan knew, Ferenc wasn’t even his real name. All he knew was that Ferenc had local ties to the shadowy organization behind Zeta Division, and that was all Morgan cared to know.

“Suppose I am,” said Morgan.

“So this Novokoff—he’s ex-KGB, right? Cold War dinosaur type who never bowed out?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you know about him?”

Morgan hated talking before an op, but he didn’t want to antagonize the Hungarian. “Killed at least three Agency men back in the day, and then a few more after he retired—one of them a good friend of mine. Likes murder and tortures in cold blood. Made a fortune cashing in on weapon stockpiles after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

“Sounds like a nasty prick,” said Ferenc.

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Morgan. He didn’t say anything else, and Ferenc took the hint.

Looking out, Morgan saw that they were leaving the residential streets behind and coming up on an industrial district. After a few minutes, Lubarsky pulled into an abandoned factory complex, through a gate that had been left open. He drove toward the nearest building, and a man in combat armor holding a semiautomatic waved them in through a truck-sized door. Ferenc followed Lubarsky’s lead into a cavernous interior, crisscrossed with rusting catwalks and populated by hulking machinery that had obviously not been operated in years.

“Oh, shit,” said Morgan. “Take a look at that.” Morgan counted three more men similarly armed. At each man’s belt were two bulbous shapes. “Are those grenades?”

“We stick to the plan,” said Ferenc. “I don’t intend to be blown up today.”

“You and me both, buddy.”

Ferenc parked the truck behind Lubarsky’s car and the men converged on them, forming a loose perimeter.

Morgan stepped out and the men flanked him. He saw Novokoff standing in the middle of the abandoned factory floor next to a single aluminum surgical table, wearing a black turtleneck sweater with suspenders, a gun at his hip. Morgan had known him from the pictures, but there was something particularly unnerving about his personal presence, even at a distance. He was aloof, his carefully coiffed grey hair and beard giving him the aspect of a well-groomed wolf. His eyes had the quiet calm of a fearless killer. Morgan could tell that he would be a fearsome opponent.

“Bringing a gun to an introduction is no way to make friends,” said Novokoff, as Morgan approached. His voice was silky smooth, with only a trace of an accent.

“You’re one to talk,” said Morgan, looking at one of the armed guards. He stood at a healthy distance from Novokoff. “Why the army? Expecting an invasion?”

“I am not a trusting man, Cobra. Let’s just say I have had some relevant prior experience.” He signaled to his men. Two remained nearby, while two others walked off to man the wider perimeter. “And after all, we were de facto enemies for most of your life, were we not? The CIA agent and the arms dealer. Oh, you did not expect me to come to this meeting without finding out everything that I could about you, did you? But of course, there is so little to find out about Cobra. It’s almost as if he were a ghost.”

Morgan did not react. “It doesn’t pay to have an identity when you have so many enemies.”

“Ah, but therein lies the beauty of commerce, Mr. Cobra,” Novokoff said, smiling slyly. “It brings even mortal enemies together in the bonds of trade. It creates a connection of trust and mutual need.”

“I think even you understand the irony of those words coming out of your mouth.”

“Ah, that is true only if you believe the game at the KGB was really about socialism. Ah, it was for some, those hopeless young fanatics who readily gave their lives for this . . . cause. It is alien to me and most of the men of my time. We understood that it was not about socialism. It was not about Mother Russia. It was always, really, only about power.”

“So this should be right up your alley,” said Morgan.

“Very much so. And apparently yours too,” Novokoff said, shifting gears, “or you would not offer me such a rare item.”

“Exactly. So how about we get to it?”

“Very well,” Novokoff said. “I have money for you, Mr. Cobra. I trust you have product for me.”

“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” said Morgan. “In the truck.”

Novokoff motioned to his men. With Ferenc’s help, two of them opened the back of the truck and took down the crate very carefully. They carried it by the handles on the sides, slowly and grunting, and placed it down next to the table.

“Be careful with that,” said Lubarsky, who had been watching intently. “I do not intend to die today.”

Another of Novokoff’s men brought out a seamless Plexiglas cage that held five large lab rats and set it down carefully on the table. The rats, fat and white with blood-red eyes, were frantically climbing over each other, frightened by the movement and strange surroundings. Next to the cage, the guard placed a short mesh hose with complicated attachments at the ends. One of the men who had taken the metal crate from the truck opened it and removed a canister, spreading billows of smoke from the dry ice. He had his own temperature-resistant gloves, like Morgan and Barrett had used earlier. The guard held it carefully, walking slowly to the table and setting it down as gently as he could.

He took the hose and connected one end into the air nozzle on the rat cage, and the other to the canister. There was a faint hiss as colorless, odorless gas seeped into the cage. The rats were at first paralyzed, then began to seize madly, foaming at their mouths, scratching at one another involuntarily until their white fur was stained red. Slowly, the seizing tapered to stillness but for an odd twitching leg.

“It appears you are a man of your word, Mr. Morgan,” said Novokoff. He motioned toward the hose, and the nearest man moved to disconnect it. He undid the lock on the nozzle and pulled, but it didn’t come loose. He pulled harder. It gave, but the man lost his balance, knocking his leg against the canister. Morgan’s heart skipped a beat as the canister teetered uncertainly.

What happened next seemed to move in slow motion. The canister tipped over, and for a split second it seemed like it might teeter back to its standing position. But it moved an inch too far, and it dropped to the ground. The struggle ceased, and everyone froze as the canister rolled a few feet and came to a halt. Then, there was a bright flash, and a wave of hot air blew into Morgan’s face. The fail-safe had gone off.

Novokoff turned to him with snake’s eyes, and Morgan knew that he understood exactly what had happened. Novokoff drew his gun and shot, but Morgan had already anticipated this and dodged the first salvo of bullets. Novokoff ’s men, however, took the cue and fired bursts at Morgan and Lubarsky’s goons. Those two drew their own guns and shot back.

“Stop that!” yelled Lubarsky.

Novokoff shouted in Russian, and it was obvious why: the crate with the canisters was dangerously close to the line of fire. One of Lubarsky’s men was hit. Morgan saw another of Novokoff ’s men fall near him; the bullet had come from Ferenc, who had joined the fray. Novokoff retreated behind a pillar, and Morgan kicked over a table and hid behind it. He listened for the gunfire, waiting for a lull. He pictured the position of one of the shooters. His eyes met those of Ferenc, who was crouching behind the truck. He signaled for cover fire. Ferenc nodded.

Ferenc emerged, shooting. A split second later, Morgan stood, and with another split second to aim, fired. He hit the man squarely in the forehead. He crouched and looked at Ferenc but saw him sprawled on the floor, inert, blood pooling underneath him.

Damn.

He heard moans. Lubarsky was several yards away, shot in the gut.

“You’re a dead man, Cobra . . .” he said, with labored breathing.

“You are alone, Cobra!” Novokoff yelled out to him. “Come out now, you double-crossing son of a bitch, and I promise you a quick death!”

The bastard. Morgan was half-tempted to make his an ending befitting Butch Cassidy, but instead he took a deep breath. There was a burst of gunfire in his direction, hitting the table deafeningly. But the table held the bullets. He was safe until they realized he was out of ammunition.

He looked around. A few feet away from him was the crate, and next to him was the body of one of Novokoff ’s guards, the first to fall, killed by one of Lubarsky’s men. His gun, however, was several feet out of reach, in the path of enemy bullets.

What wasn’t out of reach were the man’s grenades.

He took them. There were only two; he would have to make them count. He couldn’t rely on killing both his enemies with grenades—they were too mobile, the space too open. But there was one possibility.

He took one grenade in each hand and held them to his chest. One chance, and he would probably die. But if he did, he would go out fighting. With his mouth, he pulled the pin on one grenade and sent it sailing in the direction of Novokoff. He removed the pin from the other and, in the cover of the first explosion, tossed it into the crate with the canisters. And then he ran.

The burst came along with a heat wave from the thermite, which was what he had hoped for. Almost immediately he heard Lubarsky gag and cough, and he turned to see him start convulsing. He had released the gas.

And then the tingling hit him. At his extremities, at first. He had to run, had to get out of there. He stumbled out the door the truck had come in.

He panted, his nose running. He stumbled and fell into the soft snow. Consciousness was fading; he knew he didn’t have long. He reached into his pocket and brought out the syringe Dr. Barrett had given him. He fumbled to open it. His hands were already losing their grip. With all his effort, he ripped the package and removed the needle’s cover with his mouth. He looked at it: it was one big mother of a needle. This had a slightly sobering effect. He tried to concentrate on the target of his chest. His hands were about to give out. He had one chance to do this, or he was dead.

He plunged the needle into his chest. His heart raced, and he began to black out just as he heard the sound of approaching vehicles.

The cavalry had come.

CHAPTER 6

Andover, Massachusetts, the previous August

Morgan had first been contacted by Zeta Division a few years after he retired from the CIA as an assassin to pursue a normal life. A man who called himself Smith had approached him in the echoing garage under the Boston Common. Smith had extended an invitation into . . . something. Morgan hadn’t known what it was, but it was big, and it was secret. He’d understood that it was some kind of nongovernmental intelligence and Black Ops organization, and that was about it. Morgan had said no at the time, but Smith still left him with a business card. Printed on it had been a phone number and nothing else.

At that time, Morgan had sworn to himself that it was over, that he was out of the life and the business, that he was going to live like a normal person. He was going to focus on what had previously been his cover career dealing in classic cars and live a regular family life in the suburbs with his beautiful wife and his lovely daughter. But as it usually went in this game, things were not that simple.

He’d felt an itch, one that grew less manageable every day. In all his years in Black Ops, he had known there were other agencies that operated outside of the purview of the government. As an independent contractor of sorts, Morgan had escaped the tightest scrutiny of the Agency, but his actions were still tightly controlled and subject to rules upon rules. He had always thought of all the good he could do, everything he could accomplish, if he were working with an independent group, not beholden to Washington bureaucrats. And now, here it was, an invitation into that world.

He tried to ignore the business card. He kept it in a closed drawer in his home office, and did his best to convince himself that his day-to-day responsibilities as a father, husband, and car broker were enough. But the card proved a constant prickle in his brain. It kept him up at night. He would frequently take it out of the drawer just to stare at the rich creamy stock, the fine classic typeface, and those tantalizing numbers. Telling himself it was just a matter of healthy caution, he went down to Boston to look for the surveillance footage from the parking garage that day—only to find that all of the video that might have shown him something useful was mysteriously missing. Nobody seemed to be able to tell him why or how it had disappeared. And Morgan was left without a lead.

Finally, one afternoon when his wife, Jenny, who was an interior decorator, had an appointment with a client and his daughter, Alex, was out for a run, he gave in to his curiosity. He sat at his mahogany desk and lay the card out carefully—which was unnecessary, as he had, since receiving it, memorized the ten digits backward and forward—and then set the phone beside it. He took a deep breath, picked up the receiver, and dialed. He listened expectantly, but all he heard was a series of pulses, and then the line went dead.

Morgan set the receiver down. He’d known better than to think he would get a perky receptionist asking him where to direct his call, but he wondered if and how they would make contact now. He was slightly worried that the line was no longer in service, and that he had missed his window of opportunity.

That fear was put to rest the next day, during his morning run. He had dropped off Neika, his German shepherd, at the house after she’d grown too hot and tired, and had decided to keep going. As he turned onto a street perpendicular to his little cul-de-sac, a sleek black Audi pulled up next to him. The car kept pace with Morgan as he ran, and the driver’s window rolled down. Morgan’s fight-or-flight response was about to kick in when he recognized the man. Even with his large dark sunglasses, Morgan knew that precise short dark brown hair and that perfectly inexpressive face. It was a face that had played in his mind and in his dreams many times since he had first seen it. Smith.

“Why don’t you get in, Mr. Morgan?” said Smith. “I think you and I have much to talk about.”

Morgan shuffled scenarios around in his head. A spy getting into a car with a stranger could lead to someone getting killed, even in a sleepy Boston suburb. But sometimes, finding out the truth took risk. He opened the door to the passenger’s seat. The air in the car felt icy as the cold air-conditioning hit Morgan’s sweaty skin. Still, it felt great to come in from the heat, which had abated only a little from the height of the summer. His sweaty shirt clung to the leather seats as he sat down.

“Feel free to adjust the temperature to your liking, Mr. Morgan,” said Smith. He set off along the shady suburban street. “I’m afraid that’s about as much as I can do to set you at ease.”

“I think there’s plenty more you can do,” said Morgan, looking forward, but keeping the corner of his eye firmly fixed on Smith.

“Oh?” Smith asked.

“I have questions.”

“Of course you do,” said Smith. “That’s why you called, after all, isn’t it? It seems like curiosity is at least one weakness of the infamous Cobra.” Morgan’s brow furrowed at the comment. “Well, you know as well as I do that I cannot offer you full disclosure. But I will tell you whatever I can.”

“Oh yeah?” Morgan knew it was never that simple. “What are you getting out of coming down here and answering my questions?”

He looked surprised. “I thought that much was clear. My hope is that you will come to work for us, Mr. Morgan.”

“So this is a kind of job interview, then?”

“Oh, no. We’re very much past that point. I would not be here if I did not already know that I wish you to work for us. There is no point in making you jump through hoops as if you were vying for a position as assistant manager in a pet supply store. No, no. I am here to convince you.”

“All right, I’ll bite,” said Morgan. “You said you have no name. What’s your purpose?”

“We aim to make the world a safer and freer place.”

“What are you, running for president?” said Morgan. “That tells me jack. Are you with the U.S. government? Some kind of international coalition?”

“We are not beholden to the government or anyone else, Mr. Morgan.”

“No oversight?”

“I like to think that we oversee ourselves.”

“And who’s financing this little venture? Who’s calling the shots? And more importantly, who’s benefiting?”

“Our benefactors are of the kind that would rather remain anonymous. As for the benefits . . . we all benefit, Mr. Morgan. But I am aware you cannot take my word for it, and neither will you trust me when I say that our interests are—I won’t say pure, but we are the good guys, Mr. Morgan. Among those who determine our mission are some names you would certainly recognize, and some you would not.” Morgan had some idea, but remained silent. “Of course, I cannot name any of them for you. But what I can tell you is that there is a balance of interests. We have no interest in playing favorites. Just that which makes us all richer. Peace. Prosperity. Freedom.”

“How about truth, justice, and the American way?” Morgan said sarcastically.

“Much in the way that the governmental intelligence and enforcement agencies would consider them, yes.”

“So why not let them take care of it?”

“You cannot leave it all to them, Mr. Morgan. You know that yourself, firsthand. Government agencies are often slow to action, riddled with corruption and petty personal squabbles, and with rewards based on obedience instead of effectiveness. Their work is not without its merit. But their failures can be spectacular.”

“And you?” Morgan asked.

“We step in when governments fail.”

Morgan mulled it over, looking out the window at the quiet rows of houses as they drove, with the sun filtering down the bright green canopies of the elms and sycamores. “How am I supposed to take your word for it, Mr. Smith?” He said the obviously fake name pointedly.

“I do see the conundrum, Mr. Morgan. You don’t know me, much less trust me enough to make a judgment like this. You can contact your old resources, but I can guarantee that none of them have heard of me or the people I represent. But perhaps that will not be an insurmountable problem. Perhaps a solution will present itself in good time.”

As he said this, he pulled into the parking lot of a chain drugstore. And the solution did present itself, six-foot-seven, khaki shorts on skinny legs and dark aviators. There, leaning against a Jeep in a parking space, was his old friend and partner, Peter Conley—known, professionally, as Cougar.

“Go on,” said Smith.

Morgan shot the mysterious man one last glance, then left the car. He couldn’t help but smile as he approached his old friend. Conley smiled broadly in return. “I’ve been hoping you would make the call sooner or later,” he said.

“I guess a normal life doesn’t quite suit me,” said Morgan.

“I could’ve told you that,” said Conley. “It gets to you. Something that wants to get out. You can’t keep a cobra down forever.”

Morgan grinned. “Or a cougar, apparently.”

“True enough,” said Conley.

“So, this Smith guy . . .” said Morgan. “This mysterious organization. Is it what he says it is?”

Conley squinted against the sunlight streaming through the trees and said, “As far as I can tell. We fight terrorists, tyrants, and criminals. We do things that the CIA and NSA can’t, or won’t, do. And I always get a choice. The right to refuse any mission.”

That was important. Morgan had always retained that right, even when working for the CIA. He’d never give up his own rights of conscience. “Does it worry you?” said Morgan. “That you’re the hand of an organization, and you don’t know where it keeps its head?”

“Was it different in the Agency?” asked Conley. “Did we ever know why they did what they did? The reason behind their decisions? Did we know that we weren’t supporting someone’s political career more than the American people? We did our best to choose whether or not to accept the mission. But ultimately, we had to trust that it all added up to something. That’s what I do now.”

It wasn’t satisfying, of course. But Conley was right. There was no better guarantee than this. There wasn’t always black and white in international politics, and the further you went into the spy game, the greyer things tended to become.

“Are you glad you’re in?” asked Morgan.

“I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t,” said Conley. His tone turned personal and sincere. “We could really use you, Dan.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Morgan. “That’s all I can promise right now.”

Conley nodded. “Think on it. Meanwhile, want a ride?” he asked, motioning to his Jeep.

“Nah,” said Morgan. “I think I need to take some time to reflect on my own.”

“Give me a call if you want to talk,” said Conley. “You could be doing a lot of good here.”

Morgan had begun to run, planning a long way back to his house. As his feet hit the pavement, he’d tried to keep a level head and weigh this decision carefully. But with the giddy excitement in his gut about his new prospect, it had been hard to think that this was anything but a foregone conclusion.

CHAPTER 7

Boston, December 28

Lincoln Shepard’s fingers hovered over his keyboard, and he took a deep breath. He was about to set his already considerably high personal bar just a little bit higher.

The name of the thing was Hong Yan. Satellite—Chinese military, top secret, and with a big, deadly high-powered laser strapped on its back. It had been built to swat ballistic missiles right out of the sky, although Shepard had done some back-of-the-envelope calculations and figured out that it could probably even take out a target on the ground, provided it moved slowly enough. It was one of the most advanced pieces of technology in the world, the result of a years-long research and development process that was kept tightly under wraps. Its existence had so far evaded the notice of the CIA, the NSA, and MI6. Nobody outside of the People’s Republic was supposed to know it even existed yet.

And he, Lincoln Shepard, was going to hack it.

He was in Zeta Division headquarters, which took up several levels below the parking garage of a skyscraper in downtown Boston. They’d only just moved into the new digs three weeks ago. Shepard wasn’t allowed to see all the facilities in the new headquarters, although it was obviously far too big for just the current members of Zeta. What he had seen was more spacious than any of their temporary sites had been, which meant that Bloch, and whoever else called the shots, had every intention of expanding. Shepard had his own little command center, with a dozen empty workstations waiting to be filled. For himself, he had his own multiple-monitor station connected to enough computing power to control the air traffic for the entire Western hemisphere. In the corner he had his only non-computer requirement for his workspace: a minifridge stocked with energy drinks and a cabinet filled to capacity with snack food. The walls were a nice dark maroon, which were not conducive to a tranquil work environment, but he was fine with that—he found that he worked a lot better when he was perpetually on edge. He already had his Space Invaders poster up next to his workspace. It had been rolled up and put away for a while. He had stopped bothering to personalize his space while they had no permanent offices, because they never seemed to stay in one place, and each successive move just made it seem more pointless.

“Walk me through this again, Shep,” came the severe voice of Diana Bloch, who was behind him, hunching over his chair. She was the boss, head honcho at Zeta Division. The one who had interrupted his normal intelligence duties to put him to work on this Chinese satellite. Once the intel had come in on it, dealing with it had become top priority. After all, it was able to render the threat of nuclear strike harmless by making China impossible to hit with ballistic missiles, which would upset the threat of mutually assured destruction in nuclear war. The thing could tilt the balance of power between nations and aggravate international tensions. China would be able to act unilaterally with impunity, and it wasn’t hard to see how far things could devolve from there. Naturally, then, the only answer was to bring it down as discreetly as possible.

They’d had a mole who was feeding them information, that was plain, or else they wouldn’t even know about it in the first place. The most important thing that he’d brought in was a copy of the satellite’s operating system. Bloch had delivered it to Shepard in a hard drive along with his deadline to crack it: two weeks. They couldn’t wait longer and risk the Chinese discovering the mole or changing their security protocols significantly enough to keep them from being able to bring it down. “You’re kidding,” he’d said. But she hadn’t been. Diana Bloch was never anything other than completely serious.

“The target is in Low Earth Orbit,” he was telling her, now, exactly two weeks from the day she had delivered the drive, “fifteen minutes away from flying over the Nevada desert.” The fact that he had made the deadline had surprised even him, but Bloch had that quality of pushing people to do things beyond what they thought they were capable of. Sometimes, he was discovering, it was no more than a matter of expecting more from people. And now, everything was geared to go, and the satellite was about to enter an area thick with military satellite dishes—satellite dishes whose controls Bloch had, somehow, gotten him access to. Zeta wasn’t U.S. military, at least not as far as he knew—its exact nature wasn’t exactly crystal clear, not even to its members. But Shepard could be sure of one thing: they had friends in high places.

“So the satellite dishes are going to cause what’ll look like normal interference,” he said. “But in the meantime, I work my magic. I’ve got everything set up here.” He pointed to the six monitors arranged in a rough semicircle around his chair. There were a few windows open on each monitor, colored code against black, and on the upper right corner of the rightmost one, a red timer counted down from fourteen. “Ready to upload everything as soon as our window of opportunity opens.” He played a drum riff on the desk with his fingers. “This here”—he pointed to a monitor on his left—“is what they see.” The screen was taken up mostly by telemetry data and logs of running subroutines—information being fed to him by the satellite in orbit. “I’m basically cutting them off, and periodically feeding them corrupted data, so that it looks like digital interference. They’ll panic while it’s unreachable, but once it’s clear, and when they don’t see any sign of tampering—”

“If they don’t see any sign of tampering,” Bloch interrupted. Shepard could tell she wasn’t going to let anything slide today. He was glad for that, annoying as it was. It always helped to have a second brain working on a problem.

“Who are you talking to, here?” he said, grinning. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered. They’ll find no indication we were ever there. And then . . .”

“Then, after a reasonable amount of time,” Bloch cut in, “the satellite will suffer a sudden malfunction, its orbit will decay, and it will burn up in the atmosphere.” She pursed her lips and took a deep breath through her nose.

“To a crisp.” Shepard made a gun with his index finger and thumb, and mimed firing it at the screen that was displaying the data from the satellite. She looked at him with mild disapproval.

If there was one word that described Diana Bloch, it was professional. (Some of the other people at Zeta had other, less kind words for her. But while he agreed that she could be a hard-ass, he couldn’t bring himself to have any real animosity toward his boss.) She was, in some ways, the opposite of Lincoln Shepard: terse and somber where he was boisterous and boyish. But they were both meticulous and precise, perfectionists to a fault. That allowed them to work well together.

It had been a strange path for Shepard, the way to this moment. His hacking career before Zeta had been illustrious—no, meteoric—and he’d had nowhere to go but up. In high school, as a prank, he had defaced the websites of four Internet security firms. Meanwhile, he’d made money on the side expunging infractions from other students’ permanent records. He’d been a member of a group of hackers who found embarrassing secrets of politicians and made them public. While still in college, for the sheer challenge of it, he’d managed to gain access to an enormous cache of secret CIA files. He’d gotten caught for that last one. In a mostly dark interrogation room, in the middle of an intense grilling by a hairy, sweaty, unfriendly investigator, Diana Bloch appeared to him in her impeccable outfit with her eyes of cold steel. She had laid out the choice before him: he could go to federal prison for ten years and get slapped with a lifetime ban on using a networked computer. Or he could come work for her.

The decision had not been difficult.

The truth was, as Shep had to admit to himself, he was an overgrown kid. It was a by-product of a cushy upbringing and an environment—hacker culture—where arrested development was something approaching the norm. He would regularly stay up days at a time, put off work, drink nothing but highly caffeinated drinks, and eat nothing but junk food. Bloch’s seriousness and authoritarianism, pain in the ass as it might be, supplemented what discipline he lacked. At Zeta, he worked harder and faster than he had ever worked before.

The job also resonated with him on a deeper level. The group of hackers he ran with had this idea of creating mayhem for a good cause: taking down the websites of governments and financial institutions as a form of protest against injustice, and exposing secrets in hacks that, truth be told, were never more than pranks, but which at least held to some ideal of liberty and transparency. However, the futility of those efforts had been getting to him. They had tried to go up against real bad guys once, a Mexican drug cartel. They’d found out the identities of members and even evidence against a corrupt local police chief in a small Mexican city. But once the cartel had gotten wind of what they were doing, his group had received death threats, not only on themselves, but against their families. Then the cartel had vowed to execute innocent people if they continued their campaign. And finally, one of their members had been kidnapped. Realizing that things had gotten too real, that their group didn’t have the muscle to pull off something like this, they’d backed off with their tails between their legs.

But now, Shepard did have the muscle—or at least, Zeta Division did. The tactical team, Conley, and the newest addition, that smartass Morgan. A number of support teams that worked out of God knew where. But Shepard still had his own moments in the sun, even without the help of the brawn. And this was going to be one of them.

“Okay, here we go,” he said, as the numbers on the monitor counted down four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

Shepard hit a couple of keys, a loading bar appeared, completed in a few seconds, and then the clock that had been counting down began counting up.

“Okay,” said Shepard, and set his fingers to the keyboard. “I’m connected to the satellite.” A number of lines of code appeared successively, a list with “OK” appearing successively at the end of each line. “The encryption codes check out. We’re all set here. Running the diagnostics now . . .” He trailed off as he typed. A window popped up, and began to list each item of the diagnostic test he had hacked together himself. Everything seemed to run as expected, until—

“Uh-oh.”

“What is it, Shepard?” asked Bloch, hunching over the back of his chair and staring at the screen.

“Something’s not right,” he said. “It’s not the same.”

“What is it?” she insisted.

“The programming on the satellite isn’t the same as the version of the software I was working with. It’s different.” He called up the specifics on the diagnostic report and scanned the lines of code, with the differences highlighted in red.

“What does that mean?” asked Bloch. “How different is it?”

“Key aspects of the program aren’t what I expected them to be. Big things. I expected they’d tweak it, but they have a whole new layer of security and apparently an overhaul of the—”

“I don’t need a lesson, Shepard. What does it mean for the mission? Are you still going to be able to bring this bird down?”

He sighed hesitantly. “I can try. I’ll have to modify the patch I was going to install, and work manually. It’s going to be tight, and risky, but it’s doable. There’s only one caveat. If I do this workaround and fail, they’ll know we were in there, and they’ll be able to trace it back. They won’t have any way of knowing it’s us, but odds are they’ll know it came from the U.S. I can go forward with this, but I need your say-so.”

Bloch stood up straight and crossed her arms. She frowned, deep in thought.

“Boss, I need an answer now,” he said anxiously.

There was the briefest pause in which her face was filled with doubt, but then her expression turned into hard resolve. She said, “Do it.”

He nodded grimly, fingers back on the keyboard. “We’re pushing the boundary of ‘on the fly’ here, I hope you know, but here we go. . . .” He hunched over as he typed. “Decompiling. This isn’t going to be pretty. Actually, it’ll be a damn mess. But at this moment, you should be glad you sprung for the expensive equipment.”

“I hope your complaining isn’t detracting from your focus on the task at hand.”

“What I’m doing is strictly productive bitching, I promise,” he said, without looking up.

He bent down and got to work. Bloch gripped his chair and hunched in so close he could feel her breath on his ear. He knew she understood precisely nothing of what was happening on the screen. But still, she did not move. He couldn’t say he didn’t understand the impulse not to look away.

Decompiling, the first process he was running, was a basic hacking procedure that translated code—essentially, the instructions that tell computers what to do—from the utterly undecipherable computer language of ones and zeroes into programming language that people could manipulate and rewrite. The problem was that original code would always have meaningfully named variables and labels, which would have made understanding it a relatively—the key word being relatively—simple process. Decompiling couldn’t rescue any of those, because they didn’t get translated into computer language. This meant that he was going to have to figure out on his own what all the moving parts did, purely from the structure of the program. And even though he had analyzed these programs at length, and knew what each subroutine was meant to do, it would still take a genius to do it in twenty minutes. Luckily, Lincoln Shepard thought to himself, we have one.

A new window full of text popped up when the decompiling was done. His mind worked at a higher level as he scanned the code newly produced by the decompiler. Things fell into place in his head, moving parts coalescing slowly to form a picture of the whole. With increasing clarity, he saw it. He saw how it worked, and how he was going to make it work for him. He glanced at the clock. Just about six minutes to go. He went to work, applying a scalpel to the code, opening up loopholes in security subroutines, and slowly building the outline of his backdoor. Just a few more lines, and—

“Oh damn,” he said.

“What?”

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” He typed furiously, looking back and forth between the monitors. He had gotten it wrong. One misunderstood variable, and it made most of what he had done so far complete junk.

“What the hell is going on? Shepard, answer me.”

“Just let me work.”

Could he fix it? Yes . . . yes! He saw it. The way out, like a whiff of fresh air in a dank cave. He was going to have to make up for lost time. But he would do it. His fingers moved like the wind, and he saw nothing else. Just variables, abstract symbols swimming around, then locking into place as he set them down. The seconds counted down as he worked, sweating. Shepard blocked out everything else, and went into that entirely abstract zone, where he had no body, just a mind manipulating logical elements. His mind was working three steps ahead of his fingers. He glanced up at the clock on the monitor. The threshold was coming to a close. He just needed one final push. And he was done. This would work. Now it was just a matter of running the compiler....

“Shepard, we’re over the twenty-minute mark,” she said. He looked at the clock, which was now showing 20:13.

“I’m compiling!” The program ran shockingly fast on the Zeta system—but not fast enough.

“Shepard, you need to disconnect!”

“It’s almost done! Uploading . . .”

“We need to disconnect now!”

“Just . . . one . . . more . . . There!” One more hit of the Enter key, and the timer reset. The satellite, to the Chinese, was up and running again, as normal. Everything had been set right back where it had been left, everything but one imperceptible change. And they would be none the wiser that anything had happened until the satellite went down, and then they’d never be able to trace it.

“Shepard. What happened?” asked Bloch.

“I am a goddamn genius, that’s what happened.”

“Did you set the satellite to self-destruct?”

“I did you one better.” He paused for effect. “I built a backdoor. A way in, whenever we want. And that’s not all, there’s more,” he said, in his best imitation of an infomercial. Bloch did not look amused, but he didn’t care. He brought up a fresh screen, filled with varying numbers and graphs—data being beamed down from the satellite. “See? We have full access. Everything they see, we’ll see. Whatever they can order the satellite to do, we can too.”

“And what’s the chance they’ll catch us at it?”

“The way I rigged it? None. I built it into the brick and mortar of the operating system. Like secret passageways in a castle. They can’t detect us there. We can keep downloading information until which time we decide that we want to get rid of it. With just a couple of keystrokes, we can take it over, and then do what we meant to in the first place, and send it to burn up in the atmosphere.”

Bloch sighed, and seemed to relax. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Well done, Shep. You did good.”

CHAPTER 8

Andover, December 28

Morgan pulled up to his house and eased his 1967 Pontiac GTO into the driveway as gently as he could, crushing the unshoveled snow beneath the tires, fitting it into the snug space in his garage. He got out of the car to the whir of the garage door closing and shivered in the chilly night air. As he swung the car door shut, pain shot up his right shoulder. It had been hurt in his run-in with Novokoff—no long-term damage, but it was sore and raw, and the cold seemed to make the pain well up again. Morgan had yearned for the warmth of his bed, with Jenny by his side, the whole way back. Right now, it seemed like the cure for all his troubles.

As the garage door whirred, he unlocked the door that led into the kitchen and pushed it open. Neika was already waiting on the other side of the door, panting, wagging her tail and nudging his hand with her black snout. Morgan ran his fingers through the soft fur on her head and back. He walked into the kitchen, and his skin tingled from the sudden warmth. The familiar environment enveloped him—the simply ornamented white cupboards with brass pulls that his wife, the home decorator, called “old New England style,” the tan pinstripe wallpaper and copper pots hanging on the wall—the decorative elements that blended with the things that made it home, like the looming shapes of kichen appliances, the stained and warped cast iron skillet that had once belonged to Jenny’s mother, the faint smell of garlic from the night’s cooking. It felt good to be back.

Neika was still whimpering in excitement at his arrival. He ran his hand vigorously down her back a few times. “Shh, that’s right, nice and quiet, girl.” Morgan left her to chase her own tail as he opened the fridge and poured himself a glass of milk. As he closed it, he saw a new picture had been put up. It was Alex standing proudly in her Junior ROTC uniform. This made him smile. For many years, he had felt her slip away from him. As much as he respected that her choices were her own, he couldn’t help rejoicing in this latest one as something that had brought them together. They had started reconnecting recently, and now they were closer than ever.

That picture was also a reminder of his other side—the other side of Cobra, the ruthless killer. Others in his position had not been so lucky. Some, like Novokoff, had become out-and-out monsters. Others, like his friend and longtime partner Peter Conley, had become lifelong loners, with a woman in every port but never someone to come home to and share their lives with. Morgan’s family preserved the side of him that made him feel human, and gave a meaning to the things that he did that was deeper than any abstract duty to protect the innocent. He might even call it his soul, if there was such a thing. It made him whole, having Alex and—

“Dan ? Is that you?” Jenny’s voice was composed of that middle-of-the-night mixture of drowsiness and concern. Morgan turned to see her in her faded blue bathrobe, squinting, her face lined from sleep.

“Hey,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said tenderly.

“I was awake. Nightmares again.” She had been having them since the Atlanta attack—dreams of terrorist attacks, of their neighborhood destroyed, of everybody she knew dying.

“Every night?”

“Every night you’re not here.” She slid her head onto his shoulder, gently squeezing what turned out to be bruised, raw flesh. He flinched despite himself, wincing.

“Jesus, Dan,” she said, drawing her hand away. “Are you hurt?”

“It’s nothing.” He shrugged.

“What happened?” she insisted, suspicion creeping into her voice. “Let me take a look.”

“No, Jenny, it’s fine.”

“Dan,” she said, the concern in her voice turning into stern insistence, “let me see your shoulder.”

He sighed as he unbuttoned his shirt. There was no way to hide it, not anymore. He pulled it off, exposing his shoulder to the cool air inside. Jenny gasped. He knew it was bad—even though the doctor had taken a look at it, it was still a nasty purplish black.

“It looks worse than it is,” he said.

“How—” she started, then stopped herself, and began again in a weary, resigned tone, her lips pursed, her eyes disapproving. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?”

Morgan opened his mouth to speak, but she interrupted him before he could make a sound.

“Don’t lie to me,” she warned, index finger outstretched. “Not about this. Not now.”

He took a deep breath. “Yes. I’m back in.”

She took a step back, and seemed momentarily out of air. It took her a moment to digest his confirmation. Emotions seemed to struggle for control of her face, with anger and sadness prevailing. “With the CIA?” she said curtly.

“No. Something different this time.”

“What? NSA?”

“No. Nothing you’ve ever heard of.” Before she could speak, he added, “And I think it’d be better if it stayed that way.”

“Christ, Dan,” she said. “Is that supposed to make me feel better, not to know? Just what have you gotten yourself mixed up in?”

He just looked at her apologetically, but didn’t answer.

“And I don’t suppose you can tell me where you’ve been, can you?”

“You know the answer to that question,” he said. “I’m sorry I kept this from you, Jenny. But you know I have to keep you separate from this side of me. You know why I can’t discuss this sort of thing with you. There are secrets that need to be kept.”

“That,” she said, tears welling up in anger, “is a load of self-serving . . . hogwash!”

“Jenny, you don’t understand,” he said. “I can’t tell you because I need to protect you. Knowing anything at all puts you and Alex in danger.”

“Oh, yeah? Tell me, Dan. What exactly about me not knowing about your involvement in this—stuff—keeps me safe?”

He opened his mouth, but he really didn’t have anything to say for himself. He could have spun a dozen lies in this situation, and made them sound like the truth. He might even have made her believe it. If he lied, he could make her embrace him, offering a tearful apology for ever doubting him. If only he would lie.

“You’re right,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?” she said though gritted teeth.

“Because I didn’t want you to be angry with me,” he said. “Because I didn’t want to stop. I still don’t want to stop. And I was afraid that I might not have a choice if you knew.”

Jenny sighed, disappointed, and it pierced him more deeply than any needle could. “You can’t tell me what you’re doing, fine,” she said. “At least tell me this: what kind of danger are you in?”

He looked down and didn’t answer, which itself was enough of an answer.

“Ah,” she said resentfully. “I see. And what were you planning on doing if you were killed in a foreign country? Was someone going to let me know, or was I supposed to wonder forever why my husband simply didn’t come home one day?”

Morgan wrung his hands and looked down. He knew she was venting now, and of course he knew she deserved to.

“And have you even thought about Alex through all this? How devastated she would be if you were gone?”

Alex was almost all he thought about, and he had always felt justified by telling himself that by doing what he did, he was making the world a better place for Alex. This was absolutely true, and he felt it deeply, as far as it went—and given that the world seemed to be going to hell in a handbasket, this seemed perfectly justified. Still, he felt that it was the wrong thing to say right now. It rang hollow against Jenny’s anger. “I’m sorry,” he said, simply. “I love you and Alex more than anything, and I would never do anything to hurt either of you.”

“You lied, Dan. And you put yourself in danger again. Have you ever thought about what the hell I’m going to do if you die?” Tears ran down her face, and her hands formed fists at her side. “Because now I have to think about that every day.”

“I’m sorry, Jenny,” he said, and meant it. But she just shook her head and turned around. “One day, you’re going to have to decide what’s really important in your life.” She walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

He thought about calling out after her, about saying something, anything, that would make it better, but he decided to respect her anger instead. She needed this time to think about things, and he would let her. Also, her words had stung. They had hit uncomfortably close to home about his own doubts. The truth was that he loved being a spy, and sometimes it was hard to tell whether he did it for the right reasons. He suspected this might turn out to be a night of sleepless tossing and turning. There was, at least, some relief in the truth finally coming out.

“Come on, Neika,” he sighed. “I guess we’re keeping each other company tonight.”

As he walked toward the living room couch, just for a split second he wished that he had lied and made everything okay. He instantly felt guilty about wishing it. She needed time to cool off, he thought to himself as he lay in the dark. He’d be going to D.C. the next day, and so she’d have the opportunity. In the meantime, Morgan would try to find some answers regarding the mysterious organization he was now working for.

CHAPTER 9

Washington, D.C., December 29

“I don’t have much that I can tell you, my friend. You are chasing a ghost.”

The man sitting across from Dan Morgan was Kadir Fastia, a former lieutenant colonel in the Libyan Air Force, former asset and old friend. He looked at Morgan with perfectly serene dark brown eyes, stroking his close-cropped white beard. They were in his study, where every piece of furniture was made of dark, heavy wood, with bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and were lined with beautifully bound books in both Arabic and English.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” said Morgan.

“I think that in fact you knew that I would say that. There is not much that gets past you, Cobra, not if you want to find out. If you are coming to me, it is because you have exhausted your own resources.”

They had first met on a mission together years before. Fastia had been a CIA asset in Libya who had been lying in wait for a very long time. Morgan and Conley had run the mission that Fastia had been preparing for the past many years.

“You are one of my resources,” said Morgan.

“Certainly not the first you have come to,” said Fastia. “Not even close, I believe. As always, Cobra plays his cards close to the chest.”

Kadir Fastia was a powerful man. While he had no official title, Fastia had a finger in every pie. He acted as a consultant on Middle Eastern and North African affairs for various government agencies, think tanks and other private and nonprofit entities, and this alone gave him an in with a lot of movers and shakers. Morgan knew, however, there was more to it than that, that the money that paid for his house and car came from elsewhere. Government agencies frequently needed to act under plausible deniability in delicate situations. To do so, they needed intermediaries to act on their behalf and do things the government couldn’t. And the Libyan fulfilled that precise role.

“How can there be nothing, Kadir? Zeta Division’s headquarters alone must have cost millions on millions, and that’s without even considering the secrecy aspect. Then we have the equipment, human assets, bribes. That’s not even touching on our compensation, which, let me tell you, is not exactly a tiny sum.”

“Money can buy silence as well,” said Fastia.

“Not half as well as a bullet can,” said Morgan.

“That it does. And still you dig for answers, Cobra.”

“I guess not knowing just rubs me the wrong way.”

“So you simply follow the trail?” asked Fastia. “Wherever it leads?”

“That’s the basic idea of it, yeah,” said Morgan. He frowned. “What are you not telling me, Fastia?”

“Some are better than others at hiding their existence,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I have heard of your Zeta Division. Your activities have been hard to miss.”

“What do you know?”

“The fact that it exists,” Fastia said. “That it is a serious player in intelligence and security. Not the government, as far as I know. And not much else. Specifically, I do not know who is financing the operation.”

“There has to be some kind of paper trail,” said Morgan.

“None that has come to my attention yet,” said Fastia.

“There has to be a weak link. No conspiracy is perfect.”

“We don’t know of a perfect conspiracy,” said Fastia.

“But then again, you would not expect to ever find out about one, now would you?” The Libyan grinned an easy grin.

Morgan snorted. “I guess you’re right.”

“But I would not bet on this one being so,” he said. “This organization involves too many people to be perfectly concealed. You simply must do what you always do when you wish to find the force behind the act.”

“Follow the money,” said Morgan.

“Precisely,” said Fastia, his hands together, touching by the fingertips. “You have said it yourself. Division Zeta has a headquarters that cost millions upon millions. Who paid for it, Morgan? There is your link.”

“Sure,” said Morgan. “Now it’s just a matter of finding the right people and asking the right questions.”

“And isn’t it always the way?” Fastia smiled. “There is one more thing. A far-fetched possibility.”

“What?”

“A name. Tell me, Cobra. Do the words ‘Aegis Initiative’ mean anything to you?”

Buck Chapman looked at the delicate face of baby Ella, wrinkly, looking like a little monkey cradled in his arms. It had been barely five months since this baby had changed his life. So young, and born into such a dangerous world. The fact that she coexisted in the world with the terrorists, with so much death and suffering and evil, didn’t fit into Chapman’s mind. It kept him up at night, prompting him to get up to look at her in her crib as his wife snored quietly in their bed, and just watch her, despairing for her innocence and fragility.

“The babysitter’s coming in half an hour,” said Rose, picking up her gym bag. “And then you can go. Think you can manage without me for that time?”

“Are you kidding me? I’ve got this like a leopard’s got spots.”

“You’re such a dork,” she said affectionately. “Thanks, honey. I know you’ve been so busy these days. I really need this time, and I so appreciate this. See you tonight?”

“See you tonight.” He pecked her on the lips and watched as she walked out the door. He felt Ella stir in his arms. Probably woken up from the banging door.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” he said softly, rocking her gently from side to side. Ella cooed. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a cruel world out there. Lots of bad men out to get us. But don’t worry. The good guys are going to win in the end.” He sighed. “That’s how it’s supposed to go.”

The babysitter arrived twenty minutes later. He gave her instructions and left her with baby Ella. Then he got into his car and made the twenty-minute drive down to the National Mall. He parked at the far end of the Museum of Natural History, then walked around the block along the tree-lined sidewalk.

Chapman knew how to act natural when he had to. He’d been in intelligence long enough that he was always wearing the mask when he was out in public. And so, it was with a semblance of perfect calm and collection that he crossed the three lanes of Madison Drive to the Mall, where he was about to commit treason.

As he walked past the tourists looking at their maps and pointing at landmarks, the word was swimming in his mind. Aegis. It had been lurking in his head for months now. But once he’d resolved to do this, it had started to insinuate itself into his conscious thoughts. He heard it reverberate in his head as he was falling asleep, or after long stretches of silence, cryptic, its significance escaping him. Aegis. In ancient Greece, it had been the name of the shield of the gods, and their insignia, conferring authority and knowledge along with protection on its wearer.

But from what he had been told, Aegis meant something else too. Something that, like the word in his head, was also mysterious, also hidden, and also a constant presence. He dreaded what he was about to do. It was, he kept telling himself, for the good of his country. Of the world. It might help him stop this ongoing slaughter, and that was worth it. But he could never forget that, like in any deal with the devil, he did not truly comprehend the full potential consequences of what he was about to undertake.

He shook these thoughts from his head and looked for the man he’d come to meet here, near the oaks across the street from the Smithsonian columns. The man, however, found him first.

“Mr. Chapman,” came the greeting. Chapman turned around to see the person he was there to meet. The man himself was unremarkable. He looked like he might be a lobbyist or political advisor. Nothing about him would lead anyone to give him a second look. Except that, even with his glasses, Chapman could see that his face was devoid of any kind of expression. A cipher. You wouldn’t know by looking at him that this might be one of the most powerful men in Washington. Maybe one of the most powerful in the entire world.

“My name,” the man said, “is Mr. Smith.”

“So, you got something for me?” Morgan asked.

Grant Lowry stepped aside to admit him into his home, a dark and unkempt apartment boasting stains on dirty carpets and an empty pizza box on the coffee table.

“No, ‘hello, nice to see you, old friend’?” Lowry asked.

“Hello, nice to see you, old friend,” said Morgan obligingly. “How’ve you been?”

Grant Lowry was a computer programmer who’d been a friend of Morgan’s back when he worked for the CIA. They had struck up an unlikely friendship during Morgan’s service, and they had come through for each other enough times before so that Morgan trusted him implicitly.

“Same old, except for all this shit that’s going on,” he said, walking through his apartment, and into the kitchen. “The Agency’s abuzz day and night, and Carr’s been on the warpath. Plus, we’ve got this special presidential task force breathing down our necks.” He opened the refrigerator. “Beer?”

“It’s ten a.m.,” said Morgan. He looked at the pile of dishes and pots in the sink and grimaced.

“It’s my day off, and it’s bad enough I’m stuck running errands for your sorry ass.” He twisted the cap off the beer bottle and took a swig.

“So, you have something for me?”

Lowry nodded, then swallowed a mouthful of beer. “Over this way.”

For all the mess in his apartment, he had an impressive setup for his computer—four monitors, dual keyboard, and a couple of gadgets Morgan didn’t recognize, all on some kind of specialized piece of furniture that kept everything cool and adjustable. Lowry brought up an image on one of the monitors, which was upright. It showed a wire-frame rendering of the building that housed Zeta Division headquarters.

“These are the final blueprints for the building,” he said. “Exactly what the developers used to actually build the thing, including whatever changes were made while the project was underway.”

“And this is from the developer’s actual servers?” Morgan asked.

“Blue Sky Corporation, yeah,” said Lowry.

“Show me the underground,” said Morgan. Lowry zoomed in to the garage. Everything looked perfectly innocent—no sign of a multilevel secret base anywhere. The entrance to Zeta Division was, in this blueprint, nothing more than an innocent utility closet. “Is there anything else there?” Morgan asked.

“What do you mean?” asked Lowry. “That’s it. That’s the blueprint.”

“Does anything seem odd to you?” Morgan asked.

“Beats me,” said Lowry. “I’m not an architect.”

“All right. That’s all I need to know. I owe you one, bud.”

“You owe me a hell of a lot more than one,” said Lowry. “Grab a beer sometime?”

“Don’t drink,” said Morgan, on his way out. “You never saw me.”

“I never do.”

CHAPTER 10

Boston, December 30

Bloch looked down on Morgan with her steely eyes. She looked especially stiff and detached, like she always did when she was angry, her chin upturned to signal the unquestionable superiority of her position. She was acting like a high school principal, standing over him as he sat in his chair as if she were intimidating a student who had been caught red-handed stealing a test. However, it took more than dirty looks to intimidate Morgan. “Do I even have to tell you, Cobra?”

She didn’t, and Morgan wished to hell she wouldn’t. “No. But I guess you’re going to anyway.”

They were in Bloch’s office in Zeta Division head quarters. The spacious room was more like a glass box that overlooked the elaborate Zeta war room, with its long oak table and enormous screens. Bloch kept her office colder than most would while there was still snow on the ground outside. Her workspace itself was modern, sleek, all done in glass and metal, with no personal touches at all—no photographs, no decorations, no trinkets. Only a computer and a pen occupied the glass surface of the desk. It was almost as if she left no personal mark on anything she touched, which made the question of what existed underneath all the more intriguing. The only scrap of personality that existed in that room was Bloch’s own chair, a fancy ergonomic articulated leather office chair. Even the light was sterile and impersonal. The glass that made up the outer walls of her office would turn opaque on command, as it was now, frosted so that it was impossible to see through, giving them privacy as she chewed him out.

“Damned right I’m going to tell you,” said Bloch. “This was our lead—our one lead—in this whole series of incidents.” Her face was stonily stern as she spoke. “Novokoff could have led us to the people behind this. We could have stopped these events, if only we had captured him. Instead, we’re left to look for breadcrumbs again.”

“Damn it, Bloch, I know that,” he said. “I nearly died out there to get him.”

“But you didn’t get him. You let a dangerous arms dealer with ties to a global, sustained terror campaign slip through our fingers—”

“Remind me again who got us that meeting with Novokoff ? That’s right, it was me. And just the fact that I survived that disaster should get me a goddamn employee-of-the-month plaque on your wall!”

Bloch’s eyes narrowed to tiny slits, and she said, coolly, “You want a medal for not dying, Cobra? I like to think we hold ourselves to a higher standard than that. You know, being that we are an elite, super-secret intelligence outfit. And as the head of this division, I am not in the habit of rewarding incompetence.”

Morgan scoffed incredulously. “You think I blew this op?”

He’d already been debriefed about the failed mission as soon as he had been physically able. He’d never seen the face of the man who had asked him the questions. It had gone down in one of the interrogation rooms in the deep recesses of Zeta headquarters, in front of a camera and a two-way mirror. The interrogator had been just a disembodied voice, asking questions as Morgan spoke into the camera. He must have been one of the mysterious higher-ups, the ones neither he nor anyone else ever saw. And Morgan knew that Bloch had had her own session with the interrogator, a grilling of her own. He knew it couldn’t have been fun for her.

And now it was her turn to pass it on to him.

“You can make a long, long list of people who you can blame for the way things turned out,” she said, “and so completely disregard any part that you had in this fiasco.”

“Any part I had?” he snorted incredulously.

“So are you going to tell me it wasn’t your fault?” she said, in a cruelly mocking voice. “Am I the night manager at a 7-Eleven? Because I thought we were supposed to be the elite of the elite. Best of the best. I thought we were the ones who did what needed to be done, and offered no excuses.”

Morgan grinded his teeth, but he said nothing. Even if there was nothing he could have done differently, the shame of failure still itched and stung. But she was right. If he was good, it was because he never pushed off responsibility for anything onto anyone else. It was because he did what he had to do to get the job done.

“So are you the best, Cobra?” she pressed.

“Goddamn right I am,” he said resolutely, still slightly peeved.

“So act like it.”

Morgan had to admit that, even though she was a pain in the ass, Bloch was a good leader. She didn’t coddle, and never spared anyone’s feelings. What she did was push her team as far as they would go. It made her a bitch sometimes, but in the end, he was thankful for it. And she always held up her end.

“So what are we going to do next?” he asked.

She sighed, softening, a slight crack in her hard demeanor. “I was hoping for your expert opinion on that question.” She sat down in her chair. The chewing-out was officially over, and it was time to talk shop.

He furrowed his brow, leaning forward in his chair. “We have no solid leads right now,” he said. “When you don’t know where the fish are, you cast the widest net possible. Coordinate with the other cells, see what they have.” His phrasing of the suggestion was a kind of gambit. The hope was that she might let something slip by. He knew there must be other groups like Zeta Division, autonomous, with similar assets, coordinated under the umbrella of the shadowy organization that financed them, the voice from above. Morgan had never managed to confirm it, and it was designed that way. No one person in the lower hierarchy had even a glimpse of the big picture or of most of the members at their level. The irony of being with a peacekeeping organization that coordinated like a terrorist group was not lost on Morgan.

“What if we’ve already looked at this from every possible angle?” Bloch said. There was no anxiety in her voice, just cold questioning.

“There’s no such thing,” said Morgan vehemently. He had noticed the hesitation that had crept into her voice. “You know that. Nobody covers all their tracks. Not even the world’s greatest criminal mind. There’s always something someone overlooked. So you keep searching for the angle you missed, and you don’t stop looking until you find it.”

“What if there isn’t?” She unfrosted the glass around them with a touch to a remote control hanging on the wall and stared at the dormant war room down below.

“There is,” he insisted. “There always is.”

“You’re right,” she said, and all the doubt in her voice and demeanor suddenly dried up like a drop of sweat on scorching asphalt. “We keep pushing until we find our way to whoever is behind this. And in the meantime, all we can hope for is that our next lead isn’t a mushroom cloud.”

CHAPTER 11

Berlin, December 30

Novokoff kept the motor running on his Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedan, with one hand on the wheel, and another on the grip of a semiautomatic with a scratched-out serial number. He was waiting for a man he had seen only once before, and was mildly concerned that he would have to shoot him. The American.

He was on the shoulder of a country road outside Berlin. Novokoff’s own choice—he never accepted a meeting if he couldn’t pick the location. This place was good—just off the highway, but hidden from the view of passing cars, and leading only to an old abandoned farmhouse. He was ready to speed off if he had to. But the curiosity about this meeting gnawed away inside him.

The car itself was used, but it drove like new and there was no smell. He always bought them used, because it left less of a paper trail. He had a man, of course (or rather, one in every country) who took care of things for him. He had another man who would take the car later, strip it for parts, and eliminate all trace evidence by burning the interior. He could buy cheaper burner cars. But what was he, a barbarian? So it was a costly habit. But it kept him alive, and kept him free. It had worked for him so far.

Except now. This Cobra had made him look like a fool. Cobra, and whoever he was working for. Novokoff had nearly died of the damn gas like the rat in the cage. He’d only narrowly escaped in the fray, out the back, where his wheelman had been waiting for him. All those worthless mercenaries killed, and left behind to be identified. But not his own body, so he knew that they’d still be looking for him. Novokoff’s hand tensed slightly on the steering wheel. It was as much of a reaction as he would permit himself. Emotions, he reminded himself, were traitors.

And now this meeting with the mysterious American. The man who had contracted the Oslo job—and who presumably had been behind Paris and Munich as well, and who had directed him to find something with more impact than a bomb. Novokoff had calculated the odds of the meeting being a pretext to kill him and eliminate the trail, but deemed the risk worth it.

So he kept the motor running, kept his hand on the gun, and waited.

It didn’t take long until the sleek silver BMW slowly came down the lane. The windows were tinted dark, and he couldn’t see inside at all. It maneuvered so that the drivers’ windows of both cars were aligned. Novokoff ’s grip on the gun tensed as the window rolled down to reveal the man.

He was bony and angular, with a completely bald head. He was not old, not looking a day over forty, and his face was almost boyish. His countenance was commanding, however, and his eyes intelligent. Novokoff saw in him someone to respect. Perhaps even fear.

“So. You failed.” His voice was arrogantly deadpan.

“I was deceived,” said Novokoff. The American’s condescension burned him, but his face betrayed no emotion at all. “It will not happen again.”

“Good,” said the American. “But someone’s still on to you.”

“Yes. This Cobra. And whoever he is working for.”

“Well, about that. I have something for you.” Novokoff’s shooting arm tensed as the American reached down to pick something up, but then he saw that it was just a manila envelope. The man held it out for Novokoff.

“What is it?” he said, taking it and looking at the yellow-brown envelope.

“Something you may be interested in. I’ll trust you to take care of it yourself. Meanwhile, I will have another assignment for you soon. We will discuss payment when the time comes. Keep yourself available, and I’ll make it worth your while. Here.” He handed Novokoff another package—this one a regular-sized envelope, but with something thick and heavy inside. The paper, Novokoff realized, was just a way to prevent leaving fingerprints. He took the package and saw that it was a simple burner phone. “Turn it on for one minute every day, at midnight GMT. I’ll contact you.”

Without another word, the American rolled up his window and drove away. Novokoff watched him carefully until he disappeared around a bend in the road, and then opened the manila envelope.

It was a short stack of papers. The first thing he noticed was a surveillance photograph of a man in sunglasses, walking in the street. On the page were an address, phone number, and a few other pieces of basic identifying information.

At the top of the page was a name. His lips formed those words as he read them.

Daniel Morgan.

A slight smile formed on his lips as he lit himself a cigarette.

CHAPTER 12

Boston, January 2

Dan Morgan walked down Charles Street in the direction of the Common, pulling his coat tight to keep the chill February air from seeping in and watching the people as he passed them. Even in winter, these few blocks were usually filled with strolling tourists and locals alike, carefree people visiting the quaint local eateries, or visitors walking with their noses buried in sightseeing maps, or college students laughing riotously. But today, all of that was conspicuously absent. People walked with their eyes downcast. Talk was muted, hushed. The occasional raucous outburst of laughter seemed completely out of place, even somewhat obscene, and drew looks of disapproval and confusion from people around. The knowledge of a world held hostage, the grief over lives lost, and the fear of the next attack loomed large over the city. Morgan felt a twinge of guilt over his failure to catch Novokoff.

Soon, he told himself. We’ll get the bastard soon.

Past the Common, Morgan spied the building that housed the Zeta Division headquarters. It was a recently completed skyscraper, all white steel and light blue glass, with gaps through which bright green foliage peeked out. It was some new environmental concept, and though it clashed with the classic architecture around it, it wasn’t exactly displeasing. Morgan went to a newspaper vendor across the street and picked up a copy of Newsweek, leafing through it as his eyes remained on the revolving glass door to the building, waiting for Diana Bloch to emerge.

There was something that President Reagan used to say about Cold War politics, a saying that was itself, appropriately enough, a translation from the Russian: trust, but verify. He was definitely not a trusting person—isolation and self-sufficiency were his natural defaults. But in the world of espionage, you had no choice but to trust certain people if you didn’t want to get dead real fast. Trust, but verify was, Dan Morgan came to realize, a rule to live by in a world where you had no choice but to put your life in others’ hands. The work he had been assigned to with the Zeta Division so far was unimpeachable, all without a doubt for the greater security of Americans and the world—although in the usual morally fuzzy manner of Black Ops. Apart from their secrecy, he had seen no reason to mistrust Bloch or to think the people she answered to were not the good guys.

But Morgan sure as hell intended to verify.

Zeta Division, he had figured, was just one piece in what must be a vast puzzle. If he was to catch any kind of glimpse of the entire picture and where exactly he fit in, tailing Diana Bloch was the only way.

He had started by observing her. She was careful and methodical in all things she did. Morgan, having studied acting and nonverbal cues in his training, knew what to look for. Her outfit, hair, and makeup were always impeccable. Everything she said was spoken calmly and evenly, often with a practiced feel to it. Keys and personal electronics were within her line of sight at all times. Every time she walked in or out the door, she would scan herself with a handheld bug detector.

She was also, he had quickly noticed, well trained in evasion and misdirection. The first time he had lain in wait for her, she had woven through the crowd near the Common and slipped away. The time after that, he had seen her get into a subway train at the nearby Downtown Crossing Station, and had gotten in after her, in the next car. Somehow, he had completely lost track of her in the train, and arrived at the terminus to watch the twenty or so passengers who had stayed on disembark. Bloch had not been among them.

With everything she did, Bloch was meticulous and patient. She checked herself for tracking devices every time she went outdoors, he had noticed early on, and so thoroughly that he hadn’t even tried getting one past her. She never drove anywhere herself, at least not at the outset—he did not rule out the possibility that she might be parked somewhere far away.

Morgan put away the Newsweek and, under the scowl of the shopkeeper, picked up a copy of a hunting magazine. He had barely started pretending to look through it when he saw Diana Bloch emerge from the building. He waited to see which way she would go. To his surprise, she held out her hand and hailed a taxi. He marked the make and model—Toyota Corolla, the older boxy kind, white with a yellow stripe all along the side. He waited for it to pull out, and scanned the street for other cabs—they were abundant enough along this stretch. Upon spotting one that was approaching, he walked out, hearing the shopkeeper grumbling behind him about freeloading browsers who don’t purchase anything, and hailed it.

The taxi pulled over and Morgan got in. He held out a hundred-dollar bill. “You see that taxi up ahead? The Toyota?”

“Two blocks down?”

“That’s the one. I want you to keep within two blocks of that car. I’m paying you now, because I might have to get off suddenly. Keep the change—for your discretion and driving as normally as you can.”

The driver, a fat black man in his twenties, accepted it cheerfully. “No one ever told me to ‘follow that taxi’ before. What are you, some kind of spy or something?”

Morgan looked at him pointedly.

“Nah, let me guess: you could tell me but you’d have to kill me.” He laughed uproariously.

“Just keep an eye on that taxi.”

They drove slowly down Charles Street, and then took a right on Beacon at the Common. Traffic was always a little heavier here, but the driver stayed a comfortable distance of just over a block from Bloch’s cab. A truck briefly obscured their line of sight, and they lost the cab for a few seconds as it turned onto Massachusetts Avenue, but managed to catch up at Harvard Bridge. Bloch’s cab continued on Mass Ave after crossing the Charles River into Cambridge. They hung back, following with a clear line of sight for just under one mile.

As they reached Central Square, the taxi activated its blinkers and pulled over near the entrance to the T station.

“Keep going,” Morgan said. “We’re going to pass them, slowly.”

But no one got out of the cab. Instead, a woman holding two heavy-looking shopping bags opened the door and got in.

“Stop the car!” Morgan said, and the driver pulled over just behind Bloch’s cab. Morgan got out and dashed over just in time to see the woman close the passenger door. The cab set off, with Diana Bloch nowhere to be seen. She had somehow slipped away without his noticing her.

CHAPTER 13

Southern New Hampshire, January 3

“I introduce to you the Raptor Glider,” said Barrett, holding up one of seven sleek graphite black sets of man-sized jet wings that were lying on the grass. “You guys are going to be trying them out today.”

“Sweet,” said Spartan, her eyes wide in glee and anticipation.

It was hours before dawn, and the night was crisp, cold and bracing. Morgan was standing abreast with the entire Zeta Division tactical team, the ones who had given him backup in Budapest. They’d been choppered out to a hidden airfield that Morgan calculated must have been somewhere in southern New Hampshire. Going out of the way was a hassle necessary to keep secrecy, but Barrett’s revelation of their purpose there today had made it all more than worth it.

“Now, these babies will get you into a combat zone at over one hundred miles per hour with the stability and control of a bald eagle,” said Barrett. “It includes a compartment for equipment, including two guns, a large one and a handgun, and your basic survival gear. There’s also room for an oxygen tank for high-altitude jumps. The helmet has a heads-up display that gives you your environmental info, like altitude, temperature, and wind speed, with GPS capabilities. I’ve also fully integrated it with our system, so I can overlay whatever is necessary for the mission—is anyone actually paying attention to me?”

Morgan and the tac team laughed and jostled one another as they put on the jump gear and examined the new equipment.

“All right,” said Barrett. “Go ahead and play with your new toys. I won’t bore you with all my talk.”

Morgan picked up the wings and examined them.

“Ever made a HALO drop before, Morgan?” Bishop asked. Bishop was the tac team leader and alpha dog. He was tall, standing stiffly and nearly a head higher than Morgan, and black, with a shaved head and dark brown eyes. He had a leaner frame than Morgan, but still thickly muscled. A former Navy SEAL, Bishop was every bit as well trained and seasoned as Morgan. But in Black Ops, Morgan had always worked either with a partner or alone. He lived by suspicion, while Bishop had had to trust his ten-man SEAL team absolutely. And while Morgan was fiercely loyal to the few and worthy he counted among his friends, Bishop was a company man, through and through.

“Plenty in training and a couple in the field,” said Morgan. “I can’t say it’s my favorite thing in the world, but on occasion, it’s the only way to go.”

“Are you kidding me?” said Spartan, who was farther ahead in strapping in the wings than anyone else. “There is no rush like flying through the air. I’m not talking about the namby-pamby floating-like-a-cloud bull crap. I’m talking flying headfirst towards the ground, like a—like a goddamn ballistic missile on the heads of the enemy.”

Spartan was the only woman in Zeta Division tactical. She was as tall as Morgan. She had buzz-cut light blond hair and hazel eyes. Her face wasn’t exactly what Morgan would call classically beautiful, but she had a brassy, happy-go-lucky disposition that had been instantly compelling to Morgan. Supposedly, Bishop himself had handpicked her. Frustrated by the lack of opportunity for women in Special Ops in the Armed Forces, she’d decided to go an alternative route. And the truth was that she’d proven herself twice over to be as tough and coldly efficient as any of the men standing around that night.

“There goes Spartan again, talking like she swings the biggest dick around here,” Morgan said with a grin.

“Bigger than yours, you little bitch,” she said, returning his grin.

“Why don’t you whip it out and we’ll compare.”

Diesel was half an inch shorter than Morgan with a lighter frame, but still strong as a bull and fast as a racehorse. He was Latino, with brown skin and thick, short black hair. He was their engineering expert, working explosives, locks, and computers whenever the need came up. Morgan knew how to pick a lock or set up a time bomb, but it was a thing of beauty to see the speed and deftness with which Diesel’s fingers moved as he played with anything that involved moving parts.

“Settle down there,” said Bishop. “Rogue, how’re you doing?”

It was only then that Morgan noticed the final member of their team. Barrett was helping him with his harness, and he seemed to be a little pale. Rogue was a master sniper. He and Morgan had once spent hours squaring off at a shooting range, trying to determine who the best long-distance shooter was. The match had come to a draw after a couple hours, when dusk began to set in. They’d had to call it in spite of each of them having a nearly irresistible competitive streak. Left to their own devices, it would have gone on all night.

“I’m fine,” he said, his slightly wavering voice betraying the fact that he wasn’t quite. “Just not crazy about heights, that’s all.”

“I think we’ve found out who’s the girl of the group,” said Diesel. Rogue flipped him the bird.

“So,” said Barrett, after everyone had a chance to put on their wings. “If you old ladies are done with your chatting, how about we go try these babies out?”

“Yaaahooo!” came Spartan’s voice over the earpiece as Morgan adjusted his oxygen mask and pulled down his helmet. Beneath his feet, the aircraft rumbled. The wind blew bitterly cold from the open back of the plane. Spartan had dropped out the back, left behind due to the sudden massive resistance on her wings, and become invisible in her glider against the black backdrop of the night.

“You’re enjoying this way too much,” said Bishop, who had also already dropped from the plane. His chuckling, near giggling voice betrayed the fact that he was loving it every bit as much as she was.

Morgan edged up excitedly to the opening at the back of the plane, holding on tight to the straps overhead. Morgan turned on his night vision, and found the two gliders, now specks in the distance. Looking back into the plane, Morgan noticed that Rogue was hanging back nervously. Morgan motioned for him to come along without saying anything, so that the others wouldn’t hear through the wireless. Rogue inched his way into position, so that both were right on the edge, holding on to the straps to keep them from flying off, with the vast expanse opening up behind them.

“What’s the holdup back there?” asked Barrett. Morgan waved her off. Then he motioned for Rogue to come closer. He inched nervously toward Morgan, and leaned in as if to hear a secret.

“Sorry, Rogue,” he said, and pushed him backwards.

“Cobra, you bastaaaaaard!” he yelled as he fell into the sea of darkness, which Morgan saw as green in his night vision. Through the comm, Morgan heard him grunting as Rogue struggled to control the glider, which was twisting this way and that in the air. It took several seconds, but Rogue managed to gain control of it. Then, after a few moments, he said, “Hey, this is amazing! It’s the best goddamn thing I’ve ever done!”

Morgan smiled to himself. Then he let himself fall backwards.

He tumbled through the air, powerful G-forces yanking him back and forth. He didn’t know which way was up, and for a moment he thought he would hurl the plain oatmeal he’d had before leaving home. But with a few yanks of the glider, he managed to control the wings, and managed to stabilize himself.

“Nice moves, Cobra,” said Spartan. “Graceful as an albatross.”

And then, he was flying. The feeling of soaring through the air on wings was incredible. He was a raptor, a falcon riding the wind. He tested what happened when he moved around, trying turns and experimenting with angling up to slow down and speeding up by pointing downwards. He was beginning to forget himself when a dark shape crossed in front of him like a rocket. He swerved hard, missing it by what seemed like inches, but given the relative speeds must have been at least a few feet.

“Come on, I’ll race you,” said Spartan gleefully. It was her glider that had passed him, and now she was turning barrel rolls right in front of him.

She pulled up and buzzed him again, and this time he didn’t have time to swerve. She missed him by no more than two feet.

“Are you crazy?” he yelled. But he was loving it. He maneuvered as best he could to get behind her and do the same to her, but she was too fast for him. She was a natural, with strong instincts for the thing. Every time he thought he had the upper hand, she would evade him.

After a few minutes of playing like this, she seemed to pull away and get some distance between them. Morgan turned his glider so that he could see her, and noticed that they were moving toward each other, fast. She must have noticed too, but she didn’t correct her course.

So, it’s a game of chicken, then?

Morgan held firm, not turning away. The gliders moved astonishingly fast, covering the speed of a couple of hundred yards in a few seconds. They came within moments of collision before both pulled sharply sideways at the last minute. Morgan heard Spartan’s uproarious laughter through the comm, and couldn’t help laughing himself.

This started a game of aerial tag between them, a chase back and forth. They would try to get one behind the other, and come as close as possible without colliding. Before long, they were locked in another game of chicken.

“You’d better pull back,” she said.

“Why don’t you pull back?” he retorted.

She dove in harder, but Morgan was damned if he would let her win. He made the decision within himself that he would not pull away. Too late, he realized that they were both too stubborn and neither was going to swerve. Rather than hit her head-on, Morgan twisted sideways. Her glider clipped his wing with a loud ugly scrape, and a large chunk of carbon fiber flew down into the gloom. Morgan began to spin out of control, everything turning into a blur, falling, falling straight down. He felt like he was going to puke.

There was a whoosh, and a hard yank on Morgan’s armpits, and he was suddenly right side up. He had reached the minimum altitude, and his parachute had self-deployed. He got his bearings and was trying to keep the nausea down when he saw a glider fly past at a safe distance in front of him from left to right.

“See you at the base, Cobra!” Spartan taunted through the comm. He couldn’t help chuckling even as he slowly drifted toward the ground, watching the four remaining gliders, which quickly moved far enough away to become no more than dots against the lightening sky.

CHAPTER 14

Andover, January 3

Morgan got home in the late morning, physically fatigued but mentally energized. The flight had been deliriously exhilarating, and while he had mostly come down from the high, it had put him in a state of relaxed alertness. He walked from the garage into the kitchen feeling ravenous, not having eaten for many hours. As he tossed strawberries and papaya into the blender cup, he spotted Alex reclining on the sofa, reading a book.

He still hadn’t gotten a chance to speak with her since he’d come back from Hungary, and since he had told Jenny that he was back in the game. He had kept everything from Alex before. But before, she had been too young and perhaps too innocent to hear. She had still been his little girl. Now, he felt compelled to let her know what was going on. And he figured he might as well tell her now. He ran the blender and poured the result into a cup. He then moved into the living room and sat across from his daughter.

“Hey, Dad,” she said, without looking up from her books.

“Hey, honey. What are you up to?”

“Just unwinding,” she said with a light yawn. She put her book down on the coffee table and sat up. “You look a bit tired”

“I guess I am.” There was a moment of tranquil silence between them, and then Morgan said, “Alex, I need to tell you something.”

She stiffened, looking concerned. “What’s up, Dad?”

“Well, the truth is,” he said, shifting in his seat, “I haven’t been honest with you about what I’ve been doing.”

“Is this about the spy thing?” she broke in. “Because I already know about that. Mom told me.”

“Oh,” he said. He wasn’t expecting that. He’d thought she would have far more of a reaction.

“I’m kind of relieved, actually. You’ve been kind of AWOL lately, coming home in the middle of the night and all that. You could be doing a lot worse than going out and fighting bad guys.”

“I guess that’s true,” he chuckled, relaxing against the sofa and taking a sip from his glass. “Well, I was prepared to have to explain myself to you. I had all this stuff I was going to say to justify myself. . . .”

“You can still say it if you’d like,” she said with a gentle grin.

He laughed. “No, that’s fine. But I guess . . . is there anything else you want to know? I’ll tell you if I can.”

“Well,” she said, leaning forward, “is it the CIA?”

He shook his head.

“Who is it?”

“I can’t say.”

“I guess you can’t tell me many details, huh? Like who it is and what you’re involved in? Are you working on the . . . stuff that’s going on right now? The attacks?”

“I can’t really tell you that either.”

“I hope so,” she said, with a suddenly steely-cold glint in her eye. “I hope you get them and make them pay. They deserve it.” Morgan was taken aback by her reaction. She had always been a gentle soul, opposed to all violence, aggression, and revenge, always ready to believe the best of everyone. “I guess I shouldn’t have offered, huh?” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “Turns out there isn’t much I can tell you after all.”

“Well . . .” she began.

“Yeah?”

“Maybe there’s something you can tell me,” she said, like she’d had something in mind.

“Maybe there is,” he said.

“I’ve been wondering . . . how do you manage to do it?” she said.

“Do what?”

“Lie,” she said. “And lie well, all the time, even to the people closest to you.” A thing like that could have easily sounded accusatory, a rhetorical question born of resentment and betrayal. But if he’d read her tone correctly, she wasn’t angry. She was—seemed, anyway—genuinely curious.

“Well,” he said, hesitantly. He was about to be as frank as he’d ever been with her, so he thought he’d better make damn certain. “Are you sure you want me to talk about this?”

“That’s why I asked,” she said.

He leaned back, resting his head casually against his fist, and took a deep breath. “The first thing you have to remember is that I had training. Lying was part of my job. Part of who I had to be. We had professional actors and former conmen coaching us when we were training. We learned how to convince anyone of anything.”

“But it can’t be just a matter of—technique,” she said. “I mean, you have to sustain it for so long, so completely. . . . There has to be more to it.”

“You’re right,” he said. “There is. It’s—well, it’s a constant struggle, to begin with. The truth is always fighting to come out, and if you let it, it will. For the untrained, it’ll come out in overt ways—nervous laughter, flatness in your voice, unnatural or exaggerated tones.... But even if you can stop it from showing in the obvious ways, the truth can betray you in the tiniest of details, in ways you don’t expect—tics and small gestures and involuntary reactions.”

“That’s if you don’t trip up outright,” Alex cut in. Her eyes were bright and sharp with interest, and she was leaning slightly forward as she spoke.

“Right. Forget your story or get caught in a contradiction, and you’re toast. It doesn’t make it any easier that humans are natural lie detectors. And the more and longer you lie, the more likely it is that you’ll let something slip.”

“So how do you do it?” she asked.

“You have to remember and practice a couple things,” he said. “First, change as little as possible. The fewer details you have to keep straight, the smaller the chance you’ll screw up in a way that gets you killed or captured. That goes for stuff like your birthplace to what your spouse is like to . . . your children. For prolonged undercover assignments, we even used our real first names.”

“Really? How come?”

“Imagine you’re sitting in a public space and someone yells out your name. What do you do?”

He could tell she saw immediately where he was going with this. “Turn to look.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“But obviously I’m not going to do that if I’m trying to hide who I am.”

“You think you have more control over yourself than you actually do. You’re naturally conditioned to look when someone calls you. No matter how much you try, you can’t erase that completely. And it’s not just your name. It’s telling the truth. That’s your first instinct, and it’s hard to suppress completely and consistently in the easiest of circumstances. Perfect control is extremely difficult. Even if you have just a small reaction, it can be enough to betray you when the stakes are highest.”

“Okay,” said Alex. “So that’s the first one. What’s the second?”

“Have total, complete commitment to what you’re doing. Never question the lie as you’re living it. If you have any doubt about your purpose, about the rightness of the lie, the truth’s going to get the best of you.”

“But didn’t you always teach me to question everything? I know that’s how you live your own life too. How do you square that with believing in something completely?”

Sharp. Morgan smiled despite himself. “Yes. There’s a time for questioning, always. But eventually you have to have the confidence to commit to something and see it through—and sometimes, that means lying. But the thing they don’t tell you is that, above all things, it’s lonely. Not being able to share who you really are with the people you love—it’s not easy. Even if, say, most of what your family knows about you is absolutely true, they still don’t know the complete picture. They never know you, not as totally as they would when you’re a normal person, someone without these kinds of secrets. So, along with the other difficulties, you need to know that this is what you’re up against as well. It’s a life of secrecy, even from the people you love the most.”

Alex hunched down, frowning, her chin resting against both her hands, and Morgan could practically hear the gears in her head grinding. She finally spoke.

“I wonder if I could do it if I tried.”

“I wonder if you could,” he echoed. “It’s not easy.”

“I didn’t think it was,” she said, staring into the distance.

“Why do you want to know all this?” he asked. Perhaps she’s coming around to my perspective a little too much.

She was jolted out of her thoughts and took just a little too long to respond. “Oh, no reason,” she said, with affected nonchalance. “Just curious.”

He looked at her with his head cocked, but kept to himself the thought, You’ll have to learn to do better than that.

CHAPTER 15

Boston, January 5

Diana Bloch locked the door to her office behind her and walked slowly and deliberately, perfectly balanced on high-heeled shoes, around her no-frills metal and glass desk. It was, as usual, empty except for a laptop computer. Paperwork? She had none. She kept whatever she could stored in her brain rather than on paper or electronically—the only way, really, to keep anything secret. The rest was hidden between layers of encryption in her hard drive.

She sat down, closed her eyes, and lay back in her chair; it hardly made a sound as it reclined. Goddamn, this is comfortable. Her one luxury, the thing she would not do without. She opened her eyes and stared blankly at the ceiling, and her brief respite was over. She looked down through the glass into the empty war room, dimly lit, just a round pool of light in the middle of the table, by which the chairs cast long shadows. Worries and responsibilities flooded back through well-worn trenches in her mind. It was overwhelming, and it was all she could do just to keep her head above water. You will figure it out, she told herself. You always do. This is just another crisis, and like all crises, you will weather it. But even she hardly believed it anymore.

She heard the footsteps on the metal stairs first, and then, through the glass, she saw them coming up. They still knocked the same way: first three times, faint and hesitant, then a loud and persistent knock by another hand. Sighing, Bloch said, “Come in!” The door opened, and standing there was Lincoln Shepard, breathless, with Karen O’Neal standing behind him.

“Boss,” he said, still at the door. “I think I got something.”

“You mean we got something,” said Karen O’Neal, elbowing her way into the office. O’Neal was their resident data analyst. Petite, lean, and half-Vietnamese, she’d been one of the wunderkinder of Wall Street quants—that is, quantitative analysts, people who did in-depth financial data analysis and came up with complex schemes to make a killing in the markets. O’Neal had been a little too creative and outside the box, though she would still insist that it was all perfectly legal. However, the SEC had disagreed. Bloch had offered her a deal similar to the one that she had offered Shepard. O’Neal had been a little more reluctant than Shepard, but it hadn’t taken long for her to come around.

“Anyway, it’s this program I’m perfecting,” said Shepard. “Based on Karen’s financial analysis.”

“He’s more like a scribe, really,” said O’Neal. “For my brilliant ideas.”

“I don’t care who’s the genius behind this,” Bloch said impatiently. “Just tell me what you found!”

“Well, you see,” O’Neal began excitedly, looking at Shepard then back at Bloch, “everything’s being tracked these days. Well, not everything, we’re actually quite far from the theoretical limit to how much data we can gather—” She picked up either on Bloch’s impatient stare or on Shepard’s elbowing. “Anyway, we have all this information available to us. Just terabytes of raw data. I’m talking tons. Everything from economic indicators to website page views to changes in weather. But data, by itself, doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s just a bunch of numbers on a page.”

“And that’s where—” began Shepard.

“Shut up and let me finish,” said O’Neal. “So we have all this data, but what do we do with it? Well, that’s where quantitative analysis comes in. Me. So, analyzing information—it’s all about finding connections, right? Specifically, those connections that no one has seen before. Those that no one has ever imagined even existed. Like how once someone thought to look at all the satellite pictures of cows, they found out that they all face either north or south when they eat. Or when they looked the length of a man’s index finger and found out that it has a connection to how aggressive he is. That kind of stuff. But the problem with that is that you have to imagine the connection before you test for it.” She was speaking so fast she was nearly panting by this point.

“Unless . . .” said Shepard, prompting O’Neal.

Bloch raised an eyebrow impatiently. “Unless?” “Unless you can have some massively parallel computer program doing it for you,” said O’Neal. “One with no preconceptions about what should correlate with what, and who can literally just look at everything item by item. And that,” she said, moving just slightly aside and motioning to Shepard, “is where Linc comes in.”

“Excuse me,” he said, as he took over her computer and brought up a simple interface that showed a blank graph. “I came up with this baby over the past couple of weeks. It’s been running on our servers, engaging every little bit of processing power that wasn’t being used. And it’s been sorting through data, looking for things that correlated with the attacks.”

“What kinds of things?” asked Bloch.

“Literally everything we had,” said O’Neal.

“Isn’t that senseless?” said Bloch. “What use is a correlation between the attacks and, say, the weather?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” said O’Neal. “Even if you have no idea what the causal connection is—it doesn’t matter. Not as long as it makes good predictions.”

Bloch looked skeptical.

“It’s a new age, Bloch,” she continued. “Data is queen. And we’ve got more of it available than ever, and it can do things beyond even our ability.”

“So when are you getting to what you actually found?”

With a few keystrokes from Shepard, a complex graph appeared on the screen, a tangle of different-colored lines.

“What am I looking at here?” asked Bloch.

“Prices for stocks, commodities, and a number of derivatives,” said O’Neal. “Specifically, those that saw the greatest change, either upwards or downwards, after the Paris attacks, shown here.” She pointed out a vertical dotted line on the graph. To the right of it, the colored lines went either sharply up or sharply down. “Those could hypothetically create enormous profits for investors—buying the ones that increased directly, investing in swaps and futures to take advantage of the stocks and commodities that took a hit.”

“Sure,” said Bloch. “Any kind of big jump in the markets can make some people boatloads of money. But a lot of people are also going to lose big, unless . . .”

“Unless they know in advance what’s going to happen,” said O’Neal.

“Are you saying that someone knew about the attack, and used it to make money off the financial markets?”

“Here’s what we found,” said O’Neal. “First, there was an increase in activity among these financial instruments in the month leading up to the attack. It was diffuse, spread out over many different funds and over time, some of it disguised as day trades, but it’s undeniable. When we looked into who was buying these, we found that there was a significant correspondence between them—that is, some fifty companies and funds were responsible for an enormous percentage of the purchases of these instruments over the past several weeks.”

“Are you suggesting,” said Bloch, “that whoever is behind those companies had prior knowledge of the attack?”

“That is what the data suggests,” said O’Neal.

“Doesn’t seem like a very solid lead,” said Bloch. “Seems like it could be coincidence.”

“It might be, to someone who doesn’t know their statistics,” said O’Neal. “But I ran the models. The odds of this being coincidence are slim.”

“Not to mention the identity of those firms,” said Shepard, piping up. “We looked into them. They’re all dummy corporations, in the Bahamas, Belize, and other countries that make it their business to attract shell companies. Want to put odds on all of those being on the up-and-up?”

Bloch seemed impressed. “Think you can figure out who’s behind those shell companies?”

“It’ll take some doing,” said Shepard. “Electronic transfers can be traced, but for something like this, there’ll be layers of shells and dummies before we get to something solid.”

“Can you do it?” she insisted.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said.

“You’ll do more,” she said, all business. “I’m going to need a report. Everything you have, and whatever else you find, to send up the chain.”

“Paperwork, paperwork,” said Shepard in a mock gripe, lips pulled into a wide grin. “That’s all I get for being a freaking genius. Shall I throw some nice colorful infographics in there too?”

“Don’t be smart,” said Bloch. “You’re wearing out the goodwill you earned from this already. Now off to work you two.” They nodded and turned to go. As they did, Bloch said, “And Shepard, O’Neal? Good job.”

The two bowed out and went back down the stairs, talking boisterously to each other. Bloch fell back in her chair, relieved and praying to nothing in particular that this would pan out. Shepard and O’Neal could get carried away sometimes, but she had to hand it to them: they knew their stuff.

She picked up her phone and dialed.

“Morgan. We need you. Drop whatever you’re doing and come in right now. I think we might be on to something.”

Morgan arrived at Zeta headquarters to find Bloch pacing in her office, speaking on her phone, all noise blocked from the war room, where Shepard and O’Neal sat across from each other, each thoroughly immersed in their laptops. O’Neal chewed on a pen, holding it lazily with her fingers, showing off the black nail polish on her nails. Shepard, his hair falling over his eyes, more disheveled than usual, had his mouth glued to a straw through which he sucked on an energy drink. He shook his leg constantly as he worked.

“Hey, Cobra,” he said, not looking up from his monitor. O’Neal offered him just a noncommittal grunt as a greeting. “Take a seat,” said Shepard, pulling out the chair next to him without looking up.

“Bloch said you had something,” said Morgan as he sat down. By now he was used to Shepard’s lack of social graces.

“We have many somethings,” said O’Neal. She explained to him what they had found.

“Except there’s a problem,” said Shepard.

At that moment, the door to Bloch’s office opened and she began to make her way down the gently curving metal stairs to the war room. “Any news, Shepard?”

“I was just telling Cobra here that I don’t have electronic access to those records,” said Shepard. “If there are, in fact, records. The investments were made through dummy corporations, most of them in Belize, but also in a couple other places in the Caribbean. From there, all the money will be transferred out, probably into other dummy corporations. There’s no way of telling ”

Bloch stood with her hand resting on a chair across from Morgan. “So how do we get this information?” she asked, worry lines forming on her face.

“We’d have to send someone to Belize,” said O’Neal, looking at Morgan as she said this, “in order to see what records they have. But . . .”

“But what?” Bloch asked impatiently.

“Supposing we did get access to those records,” O’Neal continued, “they would only lead us to the next layer, the next dummy corporation. And once whoever is behind this finds out that the operation has been compromised, it won’t take long for him to cover his tracks.”

“Which would leave us right back where we started—without a lead,” said Bloch. There was a long moment of silence, as Bloch, Morgan, and O’Neal looked at each other. Shepard continued to stare intently at his screen, typing in short spurts. Finally, Morgan spoke.

“Well, it’s all we have, isn’t it? This is the lead. All we can do is follow it, or else it’s as good as having no lead at all.”

“It’s useless,” said O’Neal. “They’ll see us coming a mile away.”

“Well, what else do we have to go on?” asked Morgan. “Should we stay here and sit on our asses while this creep plots another attack?”

“If we play our hand too soon, we’ll lose everything we have,” said O’Neal.

“And what do we gain by not playing it?” said Morgan.

“Another shot at it. At a better time.”

“After another attack?” said Morgan sardonically.

“Maybe,” said O’Neal. “It would be better than blowing our only lead out of impatience.”

“I think O’Neal is right about this,” said Bloch. “It would be too risky to act on this as it is.”

“Risky?” asked Morgan, incredulously. “What about the people who are going to die in the next attack? I bet they wouldn’t consider it too risky to act now.”

“If we lose this thread,” said Bloch, “we might lose even more.”

“Hold on,” said Shepard.

“Unbelievable!” said Morgan. “You’re seriously considering not acting on this?”

“Do you think I don’t know the cost?” said Bloch, raising her voice, her eyes narrowing with anger. “Every decision I make here costs lives. I just have to choose the one that costs the fewest.”

“Hey!” Shepard shouted. “Listen. I think I’ve got something here.”

Morgan and Bloch exchanged a heated look, and then turned to Shepard. O’Neal, who had shrunk from the conflict, seemed glad to see it defused.

“Most of the investors were shell companies, like I told you before,” said Shepard. “But look.” He turned his laptop for everyone to see. “We’ve got a few who are individuals, investing under their own names. A similar mixture of financial instruments to those dummy corporations, all made a killing in the market. Looks like . . . at least two of them are traders operating in New York City.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Bloch. “Why go through all the trouble of setting up dummy corporations in tax havens if you’re just going to leave yourself vulnerable by having people make investments in their own names?”

“What if all these other people are involved in some way?” asked Morgan.

“It doesn’t add up,” said O’Neal. “If they were all involved in the same scheme, they would match their strategies. No, this is something else. Someone is feeding these people information they’re not supposed to be getting.”

“I say we go ask them,” said Morgan. “Looks like we’ve got some house calls to make.”

CHAPTER 16

New York, January 7

“Incoming,” said Lincoln Shepard, and the phone rang. Morgan checked his watch: 6:40 PM, right on time. The people around the room tensed up just slightly: in a chair across from Morgan was Bishop, who dropped the pen that he was using to doodle on the hotel room notepad in order to listen. Leaning against the wall was young Risa Rispoli, with her deceptively innocent face, her arm crossed in front of her. She was a spy for hire, a sort of independent contractor whom Bloch had vouched for. Morgan only had to set eyes on her to know what her specialty was: seduction. She stood up straight when Shepard announced the call. Diana Bloch, who had been in position in front of the phone, took a measured breath, her hand hovering over the phone, and picked up.

“Club Royale,” she said, managing to capture both the solicitousness and the haughty superiority of people who worked in VIP services.

“Five-thirty-three,” came the deadpan voice over the earpiece that Morgan had inserted in his right ear to listen in on the call. The others, watching Bloch intently, were listening in too.

“And your code, sir?” said Bloch.

“Champagne dreams,” he said with a derisive voice.

“That is correct,” she replied. “What can I help you with today, sir?”

“I want to set up an appointment. House call.”

“Will that be for tonight as usual, sir?” asked Bloch. The escort agency’s records showed that he always scheduled his rendezvous on the same day.

“I want a new girl this time. A nine-ruby.”

Morgan had to smirk at this one. The ruby system ranked the women in the brothel by quality, nine being the highest and, of course, most expensive. Except the whole system was a scam, and a brilliant one at that. All the women who worked there were equally gorgeous, all of them top model material. But the ruby system let the johns believe that there was a difference, and pay accordingly. This way, they could charge more from those who could pay more—the highest price was something like five times greater than the lowest—while still being affordable to those whose budgets were on a lower level. More than that, the ruby system kept everyone who paid for below nine rubies always thinking there was something better, something to aspire to. He had to admire the simple genius of this charade.

“Big spender,” she said. “Celebrating tonight?”

“I thought your job required discretion,” he said in a prickly tone.

“Sorry, sir,” said Bloch. She was, of course, quite aware of what she was doing; even that bit of mild break from protocol was calculated, a way to deflect thoughts of suspicion. “We have a new nine-ruby girl that you might be interested in. Young, tall, slender redhead. Green eyes and the face of an angel.” Morgan looked at Risa, whose lips curved ever so slightly to form a sly smile. “Might that pique your interest?”

There was a pause. “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good.”

“Shall I make an appointment at the usual place, at ten tonight?” That’s when he always had them come in, according to Club Royale’s records.

“Do it,” came the voice, and then hung up.

Their assets inside escort services were some of the most useful that Zeta Division had, both for finding out secrets and for blackmail. Few powerful men could resist engaging such services, and the threat of scandal usually proved to be just the right amount of leverage to get some small political favors and just about any piece of information out of them. And while they did not own Club Royale, they had enough pull with the management that organizing this whole ruse had been trivial. They had come out not only with the client’s contact information, but also with everything that Royale had on him in their files.

The mark, one of the people Shepard had identified, was a mediocre investment banker in his mid-thirties named Len Stuart. Getting his information had been easy enough. Shepard just had to remotely lift his daily schedule off his smartphone, and Len himself had proven most helpful in that regard.

“This guy has literally every minute of his day planned,” Shepard had told Morgan, looking over Stuart’s schedule. “Morning exercise, brushing his teeth . . . Look at this: ‘6:37 – bowel movement.’ The guy is like some kind of machine. Anyway, there’s this not so subtly named ‘recreation’—it corresponds to every past appointment he had with the escort agency. And the next one is set for just a couple of days from now.”

“I wonder if he’s made the appointment yet?” said Morgan.

And there they were, with an operation set to gain access to Stuart’s apartment and interrogate him. Morgan and Bishop went ahead, dressed in casual polos and khakis—just a couple of high-class guys, coming over for some wine and cheese or whatever, and Morgan with a duffel bag, containing everything they’d need that night for the interrogation. They sat at a bar in front of Stuart’s apartment building, right in front of a storefront window that gave them a plain view of the street, drinking iced tea out of whiskey glasses, and waiting for the plan to unfold.

They didn’t have to wait long before they saw Risa’s driver bring her around in a town car and drop her off at the doorstep of Stuart’s building. She rang the bell, was buzzed in, and disappeared inside. Morgan nodded to Bishop, and they each popped in their earpieces.

“Cobra and Bishop online,” Bishop said quietly so that no one around them could hear.

“All right,” came Shepard’s voice over the radio. “Testing, one, two. Bishop, if you can hear me, pick up your glass and move it three inches to the right.” He did, while Morgan looked nonchalantly for the camera Shepard was using. No matter how many times he did it, Morgan was still impressed by the hacker’s ability to crack any system. “I’ll take that look-see to mean you can hear me, Cobra, but just to make sure, why don’t you touch your left ear with your index and middle fingers?” Morgan did. “Okay, good. So without further ado, heeeere’s Risa!”

The sound cut to footsteps—heels along a corridor. They stopped, and then there was the ringing of a doorbell. Silence, then a door opening, and then voices, coming in as clear as day.

“Len?” came Risa’s voice. “Hi, I’m Stacey.”

Stuart looked at the woman standing at his door. She really was a nine-ruby. Face of an angel, the woman had said on the phone. And that it was.

“Of course you are,” he said, with a predatory tinge in his voice. He was wearing his best suit, a graphite Zegna with a metallic blue tie—an outfit intended to project dominance and power. He knew what these women were all about. He knew how to get under their skin. “Well? Are you coming in?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” she said, with impeccably faked girlish excitement. He knew they were faking, and it didn’t fool him. But he liked it when they performed for him. When they thought they were getting away with something. He closed and locked the door behind her, and then he told her, “So this is what I get for two grand an hour.”

She slinked toward him like a cat, holding her body against his and bringing her mouth to his ear. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” she said, and he felt her hot breath on him.

“I’m sure I haven’t,” he said in a husky voice, smiling, running his hand along the side of her body and squeezing her supple flesh. “How about a drink? I have some merlot in the decanter.”

“I can’t,” she said taking a step back and pouting as if she were sorely disappointed. “House rules.”

“This is my house,” he said, stepping toward her, so close that he looked down on her. He grabbed her wrist roughly. “Don’t you think I get to decide what the rules are?”

“Powerful man,” she said. “I like that.”

They usually flinched when he grabbed their wrists, but this one didn’t. Stuart was a bit put off by that. Just a bit. After all, he liked a challenge. He let go of her hand, and she walked a few steps away from him, pretending to be interested in the decor all of a sudden.

“Nice place,” she said. “Swanky.”

“The best of everything that money can buy,” he said. “You fit right in here, don’t you? An expensive doll for an expensive apartment.”

“I guess,” she said, with a nervous smile. “How about I get you that drink now?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll get the drinks.” He turned on some smooth jazz with the stereo remote control. “You dance.”

He poured two glasses of wine as he watched her sway to the music, eyes closed, hands running along her body. He was standing in front of her when she opened her eyes again, and she gave a little start.

“Your glass,” he said, extending it in his left hand to her. “Take it.”

“I can’t,” she said nervously.

“I said take it,” he growled. She took the glass sheepishly from his hand and took a nervous sip. He grinned triumphantly. He was going to have fun slowly breaking this one. He took a mouthful of the wine. It was good and got his blood flowing.

“So tell me,” he said, in almost a whisper. “What other rules are we going to be breaking tonight?”

He downed the rest of his wine, then grabbed her by the wrist again. “Do I make you nervous?” he said, in a way calculated to make her nervous. Judging by her expression, it worked.

“How about I pour you another?” she said, taking his glass in her free hand and backing away. He had to smile. He had succeeded in rattling her, at last, and she wanted a moment away. He’d give it to her.

“Yeah. Why don’t you do that?”

She picked up the glasses and turned her back to him. He smirked, looking at her back, then looked at his reflection on the full-length mirror of the far wall. Sharp. Something in the mirror caught his attention: her hands, hovering over the wineglass for just a second, and then a tiny, empty vial between her fingers. Anger welled up inside him as he realized its significance.

He didn’t react and put on a blank face when she turned around with a wide smile and handed him the wineglass. He took it, and raised it.

“To your beauty,” he said. She smiled and clinked her glass against his. He raised the glass to his lips. Then, instead of drinking, he tossed it aside violently so that it shattered in a thousand pieces on the hardwood floor. He caught her by the hair. “So, you were trying to drug me?”

“What?” she said, trying to wrestle free. “No! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You were!” he hissed.

“No, I swear!” said Risa. “Look, okay, I did put something in your drink. But it’s just something to make this night more fun!”

“I’ll give you fun,” he snarled, and backhanded her across the face.

Morgan met Bishop’s eye, and they didn’t have to say a word. Both men were already getting up. Shepard’s voice came over the comm: “You guys getting this? You’d better get in there!” Morgan dropped two bills on the table, and they ran out of the bar and across the street to the door of the apartment building.

“Lying bitch!” Morgan heard Stuart yell through his earpiece. “You were trying to drug me! You were going to rob me, weren’t you? Is that your deal? Huh? Is that what they tell you to do at that whorehouse?”

“No! I swear!” She sounded more and more distressed. “I don’t want anything from you. Please, just let me go!”

Morgan swiped the key card at the front door and they dashed inside, past the lobby. Stewart’s place was seven floors up, and the elevators were both higher than that. This couldn’t wait. They made for the stairs.

“I thought I paid top dollar to avoid your kind of thieving gutter trash.” His voice was getting increasingly menacing. Morgan’s legs burned to keep up with Bishop as they ran up three steps at a time.

“But I guess a whore’s a whore, right?” He heard the sound of glass shattering and a heavy piece of furniture being knocked over. “What else can you expect?”

“Stay away from me!” came Risa’s tearful voice.

They reached Stuart’s floor, and Bishop tried the door, but it was locked.

“Who the hell is that? One of your buddies?”

“Oh hell,” said Morgan. “Stand back, Bishop.”

He took a few steps back and then kicked the door as hard as he could right next to the knob. The frame splintered around the lock, and the door slowly swung open. On the floor, on top of an expensive-looking Persian rug, was Len Stuart, inert but still breathing, looking especially small and shriveled with his scrawny build and prematurely balding head. Standing above him with a little smile as if she were welcoming them for a dinner party, was Risa Rispoli.

“What the hell happened?” said Morgan.

“Lenny took a nap,” she said, as she walked past them.

“The point of your coming here was to subdue him without a fight!” Bishop hissed.

“You got what you wanted, ” Rispoli said airily as she walked away. “Now, have at it, boys.”

CHAPTER 17

New York, January 7

Len Stuart woke up groggy and confused, which was in itself strange, but he was not in any shape to notice right away. He tried to jump out of bed as per his usual routine, only to find that, not only was he in fact sitting down, but his hands were tied behind his back with something tight and sharp cutting into his numb wrists.

“Hello, Len.” The voice was more like a growl, low and intimidating. He looked up, his head lolling on his neck, and saw through fuzzy eyes that there were two men in the room with him: one standing against the wall in front of him, watching him silently from behind a black ski mask; and another one, the one who had been talking, standing over him, wearing a mask too, a deep crimson one.

“What the hell’s going on?” he said, slurring the words. “Who are you?”

“I’m the angel of justice, Len,” said the man in the red mask. He was white, while the other was black, and this one was shorter than the other man, but from where he was standing, he looked frighteningly tall and powerful. “An avenging spirit here to punish you for the evil things you’ve done. And there are a lot of them, Len. You have a lot to answer for.”

“What?” he said, flabbergasted. He was trying and failing to make the words fit into some semblance of meaning. His thoughts were clouded, and it all seemed so strange. Nothing seemed to make sense. He couldn’t even bring himself to be properly afraid, even though he knew he should be. The back of his head felt raw. “Who are you? What is this?”

“So you like to beat up on women, do you?” said the one in the red mask. “Does that make you feel like more of a man? Does it make you feel powerful?”

“Women?” he said, confused. “The whore!” he remembered suddenly. She had tried to drug him, and then . . . he wracked his fuzzy brain but couldn’t remember what had happened next.

“She has a name,” the man in the red mask said. “She can also take care of herself. How many others were there that couldn’t?”

“I have cash,” he said, still slurring his words and struggling to keep his thoughts straight. “In the apartment. I can tell you where it is. I’ll give you whatever you want. My cards. I got a couple things worth some money too. I’ll tell you where to find everything. Please. Take it all. I don’t care. Just take it and go.”

“I don’t want money, Len.”

Clarity was eluding him. His fear at that moment still seemed distant and hazy. How did they know his name? “Are-are you going to kill me?” he stammered.

“It’s a distinct possibility.” He said it like it was nothing, and Len heard it from a distance. They are going to kill me. He tried to wrap his mind around the significance of this, but he couldn’t.

“In fact,” the man continued, “I’d say that it’s pretty damn certain that you’ll die today. That is, unless you tell us what we want to know.”

“What do you want to know?” asked Stuart, dread finally beginning to catch up with him.

“That’s the attitude I like! Now. You recently made a lot of money, Len. I want to know how you did that.”

He frowned, perplexed. “Financial markets. I play the financial markets. I’m a trader. It’s what I do. I get more money out than I put in. That’s all there is to it.”

“I’m sure,” the man said. “Except this time, you made a lot more than you had ever made before. It was, oh, some time around the Paris bombing. Does that ring a bell, Len?”

The mention of the bombing in connection to his score jogged him awake. They couldn’t know. Could they? The plan was supposed to be foolproof! “I made some good investments. That’s it.”

“Good investments?” The man in the red mask chuckled and looked at his partner. “In that case let me hire you to take care of my money, Len. Since it seems like you’re so good at it. But no. That was a little more than good investments. It went well beyond what’s reasonably believable, even for insider trading. Because you didn’t have an insider in any company, did you, Len? You had a different kind of insider, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said in a half-panicked stammer. Normally, he knew how to lie, but all his faculties were failing him at the moment.

“Let’s not play this game.” The man bent down so that he was inches from Stuart’s face. Stuart could see his mustache peeking through the mouth hole of the face mask, his hard brown eyes. “Someone tipped you off to the attack. They did it in a way that you were able to make money off of it with strategic investments. Are we getting warm yet?”

“I don’t know—”

The man grabbed Stuart’s hair and pulled his head back, raising his hand to strike Stuart’s face. “Tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. Tell me. I dare you.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t,” he said, doing a fairly good job of sounding convincing.

The red-masked man’s hand came down to strike him, but before it hit, it was stayed by another hand: it was the man in the black mask. “Hold on,” he said. Then, looking down at Stuart: “We know that you know, Len.” His voice was deep, and not as cool as that of the man in the red mask—smoother, but just as chilling. “And make no mistake about it: we are prepared to kill you if you don’t give us what we came here for. Now, you can cooperate, or you can die painfully. The choice is yours.”

Stuart gulped. “He’ll kill me.”

“We’ll kill you,” said the man in the black mask.

“Who is he?” asked the man in the red mask, moving toward Stuart as he did.

There was no getting away from this. They had him, literally tied up, and they knew. There was no way he was going to talk himself out of this one. Cooperating was the only way, even if it meant . . . well, he wouldn’t think about it right now. “I want protection. I want to be in custody. I want you to guarantee that he won’t kill me.”

“We’re not gonna offer you protection, Len,” said the man in the red mask. “You’ve got yourself involved with some very nasty people so you could make a quick buck on the bodies of dozens of innocent people. That’s on you. I’d plug you myself if we didn’t have use for you. To them, though, you’re just a liability, especially once they know we’re on to you. So here’s what you’re gonna do: you’re gonna give us everything you know, and do everything you can so we can catch these sons of bitches. And in return, we get rid of them and pinky-swear that any bullet that scrambles that genius brain of yours doesn’t belong to us.”

“And remember,” said the man in the black mask, “all this is contingent on you being useful to us. So you’d best start talking now, ’cause this is the best deal you’re gonna get.”

Len Stuart took a deep breath.

“From the beginning, Len,” said the man in the red mask.

He’d have to tell them. There was no way out now, except hope. “I heard about it through a friend. A solid guy. We’d exchanged information before, and not the kind the SEC looks kindly on, so I knew he had some hookups. He said he knew a guy who was selling this tip. Some shady kind of guy, billing himself as some sort of mastermind. Called himself Moriarty. Apparently, that’s some kingpin from the Sherlock Holmes books. I looked it up. Anyway, this Moriarty guy is supposed to be a sure thing, a way to make a lot of money quick, boom-boom. Something top secret, especially illegal, super risky, extremely—”

“Wrong?” said the man in the red mask.

Stuart gave a hollow chuckle. “No such thing in my line of work.”

“So he gave you this man’s number,” said the other.

“No,” said Stuart. “No numbers. I got a location and a time. I was told that he would meet me there, and that I should bring two hundred thousand dollars, cash.”

“Where?”

“He told me I had to order a large coffee at Starbucks and sit on the Broadway and Cedar corner of Zuccotti Park, reading the Wall Street Journal. So I do that, with my black Samsonite rolling suitcase with two hundred grand. After a few minutes, a guy in a Yankees cap sits next to me. He slips me a piece of paper, and tells me to get up and walk away, and leave the suitcase for him.”

“Two hundred grand for a piece of paper?”

“Worth a lot more than that if you know how to use it.”

“What did he look like, this Moriarty?” the man in the black mask cut in.

“Average height. Just under six foot. A bit on the skinny side. Asian. Didn’t see much of his face. He had big aviator sunglasses on.”

“How old?”

“I don’t know,” Stuart said.

“You’d better remember, or I’ll find the right incentive that will.”

Stuart was sweating nervously. “Okay. Okay, I’ll tell you. But I couldn’t tell much when I met him. A bit younger than me, maybe.”

“What was he wearing apart from the hat and sunglasses?” asked the man in the red mask.

“Blue jeans and a dark grey hoodie,” said Stuart.

“Anything written on it?”

“Not that I remember.”

“And the piece of paper—”

“Contained only a date—the date of the attack—and two columns, one labeled ‘up,’ and another ‘down.’ Under each was a detailed list of stocks and commodities. I made my trades based on that list—and almost everything went either up or down that day, just as predicted.”

“Do you still have that list?”

Stuart nodded. “That desk over there. Bottom drawer. The one with the padlock. The combination is. . . .”

But the man in the red mask pulled hard enough to yank the screws from the lock hinge out of the wood. Stuart felt a bit foolish at how little security the lock actually provided.

“Should be among the top papers,” he told the man.

“Got it,” the man in red said to the other. “Is there anything else you feel like telling us, Len?” he added.

“Please don’t kill me?” he said, as breezily as he could.

“We’re not done with you yet, Len,” said the tall one. “You’re still going to do one more thing for us. If he contacts you again, and I’m betting he will, you’re gonna let us know. See that table over there, by the window? Once you get another tip-off about making another trade, you’re going to put a bottle of whiskey on it, and you’re going to leave it there. Once we get the signal, we’ll contact you. Can I count on you to do that, Len? Or do I have to remind you what happens if you don’t cooperate?”

“I understand. I’ll do it.”

The man in the red mask moved as if to hit him. Stuart cowered under his hand.

“I’ll do it! I swear!”

“You’d better,” said the man in the red mask. “And remember: we’re watching you.”

Someone put a dark cloth bag over his head. He felt them undo his ties, and then he was tossed onto the ground. He felt sharp, sickening pain as someone’s foot hit his abdomen. He heard footsteps walking out of his apartment as he retched, writhing on the floor.

CHAPTER 18

Boston, January 9

Morgan came into the garage with his car and drove down to the lowest level and then to a forgotten corner beyond the available spaces and hidden away from the view of the rest of the cars and pedestrians. He parked his car and walked out to a forgotten unmarked door with a key-card reader next to it. Inside was a dark room, which lit up when he closed the door behind him. Here was another door, and a breaker box next to it. He opened the box and revealed a biometric reader. Morgan scanned his retina and palm. The door unlocked. There was a small hallway that led to an elevator and stairwell. He knew that there was another layer of security at work here—cameras with face-recognition software checking every person who came in. The elevator door opened, and he went down.

He emerged and walked down a short hallway to the Zeta Division war room, where Diana Bloch and Lincoln Shepard were both standing, looking at one of the smaller monitors embedded in the wall while Karen O’Neal sat against a wall, flicking through pages on a tablet computer.

“Come in, Cobra,” said Bloch. “We were just looking over some surveillance footage. Please, sit down.”

Morgan pulled up a chair near the monitor, next to Shepard, but it was unnecessary, because moments later Shepard switched the active monitor to the big screen. Morgan dragged his chair back a few paces in order to get a more comfortable view.

“We’ve been going over the info we got from Stuart,” said Shepard. He sat down, slumped in his chair worse than usual—it was always obvious when he was bored—and his tone made it clear they hadn’t gotten very far. “It’s pretty thin. Painfully nondescript Asian man, average height, average complexion, dark brown hair, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Calls himself Moriarty, after the fictional criminal mastermind from the Sherlock Holmes series. In the books, he was supposed to be some kind of godfather, ruling over every major crime in England.”

“I’m going to call it that this guy’s not the mastermind we’re looking for,” said Morgan. “The real big fish don’t bother with the cutesy nicknames. And what he’s getting here is chump change for the magnitude of this operation. Whoever’s really behind this is making a lot more than a couple hundred thousand.”

“You share my opinion on him, then,” said Bloch, who had remained standing up, subtly dominating the room as she usually did. “Shepard, why don’t you show Cobra what we have?”

Shepard stood up wearily under the screen with a clicker in his hand. “First bit of evidence is this note,” he said. With the clicker, he brought a scan of the note up on the monitor. “Written on a typewriter, which sidesteps printer ID altogether. Tells us we’re not working with an amateur.” Morgan had learned about that from working in intelligence. Every consumer printer always printed, with every document, a few imperceptibly small and light dots scattered around the document. While invisible to the naked eye, these could be scanned by a machine, which meant that any printer could be identified from a database.

“The typewriter is a potential lead, isn’t it?” asked Morgan, pointing to the note. “Can’t we track him using that?”

“Well,” said Shepard, “this much is true: there’s a thousand little moving parts, and the wear and tear will cause each typewriter to leave a specific signature—usually in the form of slightly, distinctively misaligned letters.” Shepard seemed more engaged, and his frame seemed to sag slightly less, as he explained—Morgan could tell he enjoyed going through this sort of explanation. “So it would be possible to match a piece of text to a particular typewriter.” He bent down at a computer and typed something into it. “But here’s the problem.”

Shepard brought up on the big screen a photo of a big, clunky machine with a dull grey plastic casing. “Analysis shows that this is the machine that the note was written on. The Underwood Touch-Master 5. An office favorite in the early sixties. You can find at least a couple dozen for sale on the Internet at any given moment. Then there are antique shops, garage sales.... There’s no telling how many of those are still out there, and it very well may be that there’s absolutely no record of this particular typewriter after it was originally manufactured and sold. Bottom line, there’s no way of identifying and finding out where it is. It’s hopeless to try to track it.”

“I see,” said Morgan. “But we still have the surveillance tapes of Stuart’s first meeting with this guy, right? What do we have on that?”

“That’s a little more promising,” said Shepard. He went back to typing and moving things around at his terminal. “I pulled whatever footage I could get of the area during the time when Stuart made the exchange, from traffic and security cameras.” He brought up a video window on the big screen that showed a view about five feet above eye level of a paved plaza with a number of regularly spaced slender trees, a thin, heavily trodden sprinkle of snow on the ground, with a sparse but steady flow of pedestrians walking left to right and a few sitting on evenly spread stone benches. “That’s Zuccotti Park, and you can see our guy there a little to the right of center.” The picture showed Stuart sitting nervously on one of the stone benches in a fancy tan overcoat with a copy of the Wall Street Journal, a large cup of coffee sitting on the stone next to him, his hand resting on a black suitcase as he looked furtively in every direction. The angle was a little above eye level, and the picture was crisp and clear enough to just make out the label on Stuart’s coffee.

“We’ve got another angle on the scene,” said Shepard, and brought up another window playing video of the same scene simultaneously, but this one from much higher up, two stories at least, and from the side rather than the front. Morgan saw by comparing walking figures in both images that they were perfectly synchronized.

“There’s our guy,” said Shepard, pointing out a man wearing, just as Stuart had described, a grey hoodie jacket and blue jeans, old white sneakers on his feet. His face was well-obscured by sunglasses and a baseball cap. He faced away from both cameras as he walked. He sat down next to Stuart.

“Watch his face,” Shepard said.

Morgan did—or rather, tried. The hat alone would have obscured it almost completely given the angles of both cameras. In addition to that, however, he managed to keep his head down, and somehow, at no point was Morgan able to catch a glimpse of anything more than his chin.

“The bastard knows where the cameras are,” he said. “He’s hiding from us.”

“Right,” said Shepard. “He keeps it up, too. Not one good frame. Look,” he said, pointing. “Here is where he passes the note.”

“How about face-recognition software?” Morgan asked

In the video, Len Stuart got up nervously and walked away, leaving the suitcase behind.

“Never even registers as a face at all,” said Shepard. “I ran it three times, just to be sure. See, this is when he gets up.” Shepard pointed at the videos with two fingers on his right hand. Perfectly synchronized, the figure in both videos got up, grabbed the handle of the suitcase, and wheeled it away.

“I managed to follow him through various video feeds along a couple of blocks.” Shepard brought up a new window with video from a different camera that showed the man as he turned a corner. He navigated around pedestrians, walking quickly. His pace was brisk, though not quite athletic. In fact, his step was graceless, almost mechanical.

“And this is where we lose him.”

The man walked into a deli, pulling the suitcase in behind him.

“He doesn’t come out,” said Shepard. “Not out of this door, not unless he’s heavily disguised. Our best guess is that he walked out into the back alley.”

“Has anyone been down to check out the deli?”

“I sent Bishop,” cut in Diana Bloch. “No security cameras inside, and nobody remembers anything, except one thing: they found an empty black suitcase in the bathroom. Nobody remembers who left it there. And it seems the door to the back alley is easily accessible, so it’s plausible he slipped out without anyone noticing. The question,” she continued, “is, what next?”

“What’s the status on Stuart?” asked Morgan.

“We’ve got Rogue, from tactical, tailing him,” said Bloch. “Plus the surveillance you installed in his apartment and taps on every piece of electronic equipment he owns. He’s not squealing.”

Morgan ran his hands through his hair as he thought. “Len wasn’t our only lead to this guy,” he said, looking at Karen O’Neal, who was still standing against the wall fiddling with her tablet.

“We’ve got four more names at the moment,” she said.

“Which means four more people who made trades,” said Morgan. “Four more meetings where this guy might have made a slip and showed his face. Four more meetings to establish a pattern, and maybe triangulate his position in the city.”

“All that may be true and still not worth the risk,” Bloch said, staring pensively at the screen. “Targeting more of his buyers makes it that much more likely that we’ll tip this guy off. We can’t afford to spook him. He’s our only connection to all this now.”

“You’re saying we wait until the next drop-off?” said Morgan. “Just sit on our asses until it happens?”

“That’s the long and short of it,” said Bloch, shooting Morgan a stony, superior look. “What would you have us do?”

“Attack this with everything we’ve got,” said Morgan.

“Of course,” she said wryly. “What else would you suggest?”

“Get each name on that list and extract every drop of information that we can from them,” he said, ignoring her comment. “We hit him fast and hard. We’ll be on him before he has any idea we were even aware of his existence.”

“Every person we contact is another possible breach,” she said. “If our man Moriarty catches wind that we’re on his tail, he’s going to drop everything and we’re back at a dead end.”

“He gave Stuart the information on the last attack less than a week before Paris,” Morgan insisted. “If we don’t go all out now, we won’t be able to stop the next attack. Damn it, Bloch, people’s lives are at stake!”

“Do you think you need to remind me of that?” snapped Bloch, uncrossing her arms. She raised her voice in anger. “Do you think I don’t know what the stakes are here, Cobra? Every day that passes means we’re one day closer to the next attack. The clock’s ticking. I haven’t forgotten. I couldn’t if I tried. But every single lead we’ve had has slipped through our fingers. I don’t intend to let the same happen with this one.” She took a few deep breaths, and then sat down heavily on the nearest chair. “I apologize for that outburst,” she said. “Your input is appreciated. But we need to be cautious here. We don’t know how long this pattern will go on. We focus on the big picture. Getting whoever is behind this. If that means risking letting another one happen, well.” She gave a rueful pause. “That’s a risk we need to take.”

“Am I hearing this correctly?” he said, standing over her. “You’re actually going to risk people dying because you’re too timid to act? Bullshit. You’re weak, and your weakness is going to cost people their lives.”

“You watch your mouth, Morgan,” she said. “I’m still your superior here, in case you’ve forgotten. The final decision is mine. We wait.”

“You’re making a mistake,” he said.

“It’s mine to make,” she said. “Until you bear this level of responsibility, you’ll have no idea what it means to make the tough call.”

“You’re the boss,” he said with a cold, controlled fury. Without taking his eyes off her, he pushed his chair so that it flipped onto the floor and slid to O’Neal’s foot. He stormed off without another word.

“Yes,” she said quietly, bending down to pick up the chair. “I am.”

CHAPTER 19

New York, January 19

Moriarty. It was a bold choice. Pretentious, Marcus Lee would be the first to admit; but he was a dreamer, a true visionary, so why settle for less? After all, hadn’t he figured out the scheme, the game, the master plan? Wasn’t he exploiting it, right under his employer’s nose? The scheme was making him millions on top of millions, and this was only the beginning. He’d hardly broken a sweat. It’s all up from here, baby.

He clutched his briefcase tightly in his right hand as he exited the subway into the icy Manhattan air, wincing in the sunlight while, with his left hand, he played with the ballpoint pen in his pocket—a pen that concealed a two-inch knife. He had taken to carrying it with him wherever he went after he read about it in a self-defense book. Whenever he sat down alone, he would practice removing the cap and drawing it until it became one fluid motion.

He dodged pedestrians on the sidewalk, power-walking toward the designated rendezvous point. Lee would readily admit to himself that he was enjoying the hell out of this cloak-and-dagger business. Who’d have thought that scrawny little Marcus Lee, the same little Asian kid who’d spent his graduation stuffed in a locker, the quiet nerd who had never even held hands with a girl until he was nineteen, would be getting away with this? He couldn’t help but grin at the thought.

At the moment, he was on his way to meet with the man who had started all this. The man with the plan. The man with no name.

He’d emerged on the corner of Broadway and West Fiftieth Street. and stood there as instructed in front of the Gershwin Theater, squinting as he looked around for the man he was supposed to meet. His eyes scanned the passing tourists and natives, pedestrians waiting at the crosswalk, the customers in line at the hot dog cart. He’d been told to wait here and nothing else, so he didn’t know who was coming to meet him or from where. He was startled but not entirely surprised when a limousine pulled over and, from the open window, the man without a name said, “Get in.”

Lee opened the door and sat on a seat upholstered in white leather. The boss was sitting across from him facing backwards, placidly cross-legged, in a sharply tailored navy pinstriped suit. His bony face had a flat expression as always. Next to Lee, taking up well more than his half of the seat, was a huge man with a goatee and a thick neck who looked like he could be a football player, which by itself was enough to make Lee nervous. He was in a black suit, and suddenly Lee was feeling underdressed in his khakis, polo shirt, and puffy down jacket.

“Is this really necessary?” asked Lee, motioning with his head in the direction of the bodyguard.

“You’ve been dodging my calls,” he said, ignoring the question.

“Busy,” said Lee. “You know how it is when you get in the zone with something. . . .”

“Right. In the zone.”

“But I wouldn’t want you to think I’ve been ignoring our partnership.”

“I certainly hope you haven’t been prioritizing side projects over our objectives,” he said.

Lee couldn’t help furrowing his brow at this, but caught himself and resumed a neutral expression immediately. Did he know? Could he know? Or was it a harmless throwaway comment? “My priorities are with our work here. That was the deal, wasn’t it? While working with you, I work only with you.”

“Yes, that was the deal. And if I recall, there was more to that deal. Do you have it?”

Lee opened his briefcase, and felt the bodyguard tense as he reached into it. “Easy,” he said to the mountain beside him. He pulled out a manila folder. “See? Nothing sinister here. Just paper.”

The bodyguard grunted.

Lee handed the folder over to his boss. “Here you go. A complete investment plan for the next . . . event. Like the other ones, but better. I think you’ll find this one particularly inspired. Subtle, I would call it.”

The man opened the folder and calmly leafed through it.

“Not that it was hard,” Lee continued. “But it’s no simple matter not to be obvious about it. You know how it is.”

The boss gave him a pointed look. Lee knew he must be sweating. His hand unconsciously played with the pen in his pocket.

“This actually just might be my best work yet. Really complex mix of stocks, futures, swaps, and forex. No obvious shorts. Guaranteed undetectable. Just a well-balanced portfolio that any investor might put together.”

The man across from him continued to peruse the document, flipping through the pages at a measured pace. “This is looking good,” he said. “Even at a glance, I can tell this is top-notch work.”

“Thanks. Sir.”

“Looks like I picked the right guy for the job, didn’t I?”

“Not to blow my own horn . . .”

“But doing it just the same. You talk too much, Lee. Has anyone ever told you that?”

There was a moment of silence when Lee just stared at the man, and the man stared back. What was he saying? “What-what do you mean?”

“It’s a weakness. This need to fill the silences. This fear of empty spaces. It means you don’t have a quiet mind. You’re not listening when you have to, not even to your own thoughts, let alone paying attention to where you are and what you’re doing.”

“You should write a self-help book,” Lee told him. “I know a lot of people who just eat that stuff up—you know, that silence talk, the empty spaces and all.” He knew he was making a fool of himself and wearing his anxiety on his sleeves, but he couldn’t stop babbling. “Real deep stuff, yeah.”

The man just looked at him stolidly, with his brown eyes looking dead and emotionless.

Lee chuckled nervously. Best to play this off. “You know, for a minute there, I thought you were insinuating that I had talked, you know. Blabbed. About this.”

“Oh, of course not. Because flapping your mouth is for lesser men. Biting off more than you can chew and stupid mistakes are not worthy of an inspired criminal mind. That’s amateur stuff. And I guess you’re too smart for that, aren’t you, Moriarty?”

Lee’s eyes went wide, but before he could react, he felt something cut into the skin of his neck, squeezing his windpipe. The bodyguard was using a garrote, he realized, pulling back and cutting off his air. Without thinking, Lee slipped his hand into his pocket and out came the pen knife. Quick as lightning, he plunged it as hard as he could into the bodyguard’s thigh.

The man let out a roar of pain. Taking the opportunity, Lee lunged for the door, pulled the lock, and pushed it open. Cold air rushed into the limo. The car was moving at about twenty-five miles an hour, with traffic all around them. With no time to hesitate, he leapt out the door, rolling as he hit the pavement. He hit it hard. Even though his jacket broke some of the impact, he still felt pain in too many places to count. Just as he came to a standstill, on his hands and knees on the cold road, he heard the screech of brakes as a dark blue Chevy sedan stopped inches from his face.

With no time to even take stock of the damage, he got up, shoes scraping the pavement. He dashed onto the sidewalk, dodging confused onlookers, and ran without looking back.

CHAPTER 20

Andover, January 21

Morgan drove up along the dirt road and spotted Alex’s car parked ahead. On either side of him was forest, the evergreen foliage, covered with light snow, too dense for him to have any kind of visibility, even though they were so close to the highway he could hear cars passing by. Intermittent gunshots rang out in the white and green wilderness, three all together as he approached. He parked behind her, still looking at the map on his smartphone that showed the red dot where she was, a few dozen feet away.

Morgan had feared the worst when he had noticed, some twenty minutes before as he brought his breakfast into his study, that one of his guns, his silenced M&P Series Smith and Wesson, had gone missing. He had figured that Alex had taken it, but he had no idea what for. Given the strange way she’d been acting lately, he didn’t know what to think.

Snow crunching under his feet, he walked toward a clearing in the forest where the GPS indicated she would be and found her aiming at a collection of cans and bottles, placed a few feet apart from each other. It appeared that she hadn’t hit any yet.

“You should keep your legs farther apart,” he said. Alex wheeled around in surprise, holding the gun out. She pointed it up when she saw that it was her father.

“Jesus, Dad,” she said, exhaling. Her face was red from the cold, which stood out against her white winter hat. “You scared me half to death.”

“Sorry about that,” he said, smiling. “I’ll be sure to make more noise next time I sneak up behind you.”

“How did you find me?” she asked, lowering the gun and holding her arms slack at her sides.

“Phone,” he said, holding up his to show her the map.

“Damn,” she said, running her left hand over the side pocket of her peacoat where he guessed her phone was. “I knew I should’ve left it back home. I guess you’re going to want some kind of explanation.”

“I was hoping you might give me one,” he said.

“Can we get out of the cold first?” she asked, shivering.

He turned back toward his car and motioned her into the passenger seat. First, she handed him the gun, which he put into the glove compartment. Then she took off her gloves—full-fingered bicycle gloves so her finger would fit in the trigger—and blew on her hands to heat them up.

“So?” he said.

She sat back and took a deep breath. “Well, I guess it’s no secret that I’m not exactly a pacifist anymore. My life, these attacks . . . things just don’t make the same sort of sense that they used to, you know?”

“What do you mean, sweetheart?”

“All this regular, everyday stuff. School, college applications, summer jobs.” She stared out into the woods. “It’s like none of that matters anymore. Like it’s all distant, from another life or something.”

“It just sounds like you’re ready for the next stage in your life,” said Morgan.

“What? Going to college? No, Dad. That’s not it. It’s the normal stuff. Picking a major, choosing a career. Going through all that stuff. All that doesn’t make any sense anymore. How could it?” She pulled her hat from her head. “There are evil people in the world. People who would kill us, destroy us completely if they could. And they’re not only abroad. They’re here. They could even be in the goddamn government. The people we’re supposed to trust. How am I supposed to go to college knowing that? How am I supposed to get a job? Have a family?” Her sharp green eyes burned with a beautiful kind of intensity as she spoke.

“Well,” said Morgan, taken aback. It wasn’t the kind of advice he’d ever give her, but he certainly saw her point. “What else are you going to do?”

“Be like you, and fight,” she said.

He really should have seen this one coming.

“Honey . . .” he began. He didn’t quite know what to say.

“What? I shouldn’t, because it’s dangerous? Is that what you were going to say?”

“It was something along those lines, yes,” he said chuckling.

“Well, save it,” she said curtly. “I don’t care that it’s dangerous. What else can I do, Dad? What can I do, knowing what I know?”

“Be safe,” he said. “Stay out of trouble rather than go out looking for it. I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong about this, Alex. But I’ve seen a lot of things in my life. Getting involved in this sort of thing—the danger is amplified, and it’s constant. It’s always there, it never goes away.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Dad. I really do.” She looked out the passenger window, and bit her thumb. Then she looked back at him. “But just tell me this: what would you do, if you were in my place? Would you give up and live a normal life?”

He didn’t have to think too hard about that one. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“Well? Why do you expect me to?”

Morgan sighed. She really had him there. There was nothing he could say without sounding like a hypocrite—nothing he could honestly say to change her mind. Maybe that’s what it meant to let them grow up—when you couldn’t lie to them to keep them out of trouble anymore. “You’re going to finish high school. That’s final.”

“If I do, will you teach me how to shoot?”

Morgan thought about it for a second and then said, “Okay.”

“Really?” she asked, beaming.

“Yes. But we keep this just between us, do you understand? I don’t think your mother would approve of this new . . . lifestyle choice. We can tell her later. Do we have a deal?”

“We have a deal,” she said with a big grin on her face.

“All right. That’s enough for today. Let’s get home.”

She opened the passenger door. Before getting out, she turned to him and said, “I love you, Daddy.”

“Love you too, honey. Drive safely.”

CHAPTER 21

New York, January 22

Morgan looked into the window of the Laundromat. He saw Len Stuart sitting inside in one of the chairs, wearing one of those hands-free phone earpieces as he’d been told to. He was staring at a load of laundry tumbling in a dryer a few feet to his right—not quite facing away from the front door as instructed, but close enough. Morgan could still see most of the back of his head, with thinning light hair and an incipient bald spot. He was fidgeting nervously with his hands, turning his head twitchily, like he was expending a lot of effort not to turn around.

Morgan opened the door and immediately felt the dry heat coming off of the machines. Stuart made like he was going to look back, at Morgan, but stopped himself in time. Good boy. Morgan took off his hat and pulled off his gloves. The door behind him swung shut, closing off the sounds of the street. He sat down directly behind Stuart, so that each faced away from each other. In front of him, a middle-aged Latina woman was folding her clothes while a young man in baggy jeans was loading a washer. A young woman and an old man were sitting in separate chairs with their respective baskets. Morgan took out his phone, pretended to dial, and then held it to his ear.

“Hello, Len,” he said. “Don’t turn around. Do not—” Len remained still. “Good. Glad to see you here. Did you miss me?” The sound of the washers and dryers was enough to mostly drown out their voices.

“Let’s see,” spat Stuart. “You sent a whore to my apartment to drug me. Then you tied me up, threatened me, and beat me. What do you think?”

“I think you knowingly profited from a terrorist attack that killed a lot of innocent people,” said Morgan. “Apart from that, you’re a creep and an asshole. What of it?”

“You were the one in the red mask, weren’t you?”

“I’d advise you not to speculate too much about who I am,” said Morgan. “It could be hazardous to your health.”

Stuart sighed impatiently. “The bitch gave me a concussion. Did you know that?”

“I’m sure you suffered terribly,” said Morgan with mock-concern. A woman across the room started a dryer, which whirred softly. “How about I give a call to someone who was orphaned by one of the attacks you profited from, and you can cry on their shoulder?”

“How about we just get this over with?”

“I’m sure you’re very eager to do your part to set things right. That would set your conscience at ease, wouldn’t it, Len? Just remember, if you turn around or try to sneak a peek in any other way, I break your nose.”

He raised his voice slightly in that last phrase, and the Latina looked up and gave him a sidelong glance, but then went right back to folding a man’s white dress shirt.

“How could I forget, when you put it like that?” Stuart said bitterly.

“Good boy,” Morgan said. “So, the man. He made contact with you again?”

“Yeah. A letter. I found it in the mailbox in my building, inside an envelope.”

“No return address, I take it?”

Stuart scoffed, but Morgan noticed that beads of sweat were forming on the back of his head. “He sent it by courier. There’s a name and a signature.”

“Helpful. Did you bring the envelope?” asked Morgan.

“Yeah, I got it right here. Thought it might be useful. See, I’m looking out for you. You beat me, you threaten me, and still I do right by you.”

“You’re a paragon of selflessness,” Morgan said. “All right, Len, let’s have it then. You’re going to pass it to me under the chairs, on your right-hand side. Understand?”

“Got it,” he said. “Now?”

“On my mark. Three, two, one, go.”

Morgan reached down, and searching with his hand, he found the proffered envelope. It was light cardboard. He brought it up to his lap. He looked down at it and saw that it had the label of a courier company. He opened it and drew out the paper inside. Holding it at his lap, he unfolded it carefully to glance at it.

“Are you kidding me?” he said when he saw its contents.

“That’s what I got,” said Stuart. “Exactly as it was delivered to me.”

Morgan looked at the note again and then said, “I’ll be in touch.” He tucked the note into his jacket pocket, got up, and put his hat on. The bell on the door rang as he pushed it open, and walked back out into the cold.

Morgan waited down the block from Stuart’s building, conspicuously holding a manila envelope in his gloved hand. The sun, already low in the sky, shone off the windows of the buildings overhead. Morgan looked at his watch, then up to see the bicycle approaching. Right on time, a lean young man in full gear rode along and stopped in front of him, skidding for two feet on slush as he did.

“Hey, man, are you the pickup?” he asked without getting off his bike. He had blond stubble on a dopey face and curls peeked out from under his helmet.

“Yeah,” said Morgan. “Listen, I need to have a word with you.”

“A word? Hey man, I got less than fifteen minutes to make it all the way to Canal Street. Is that the package there?” He began to reach for the envelope.

“Stay,” said Morgan, pulling back the envelope and offering him a folded fifty instead. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

The man looked backwards and forwards nervously. Morgan could tell he wasn’t used to taking bribes. He looked like he’d gone to college, one of those granola health-freak types, doing this as a day job while trying to make it in the city. But apparently, his need spoke louder, because he took the proffered bill and got off his bike. “All right, what’s up?”

“You delivered something earlier today to that building down there. Ring a bell?”

“Hey, what is this?” he said, frowning and leaning back. “I deliver a lot of things. I don’t remember anything about particular pickups.”

“It’s very, very important that you tell me everything you can about the delivery of this envelope.” Morgan pulled out of his jacket the envelope that Stuart had given him.

He looked at it, then looked around at the street, careful to keep his eyes averted from Morgan’s. “Look, we don’t look at the documents we send, and we don’t look too hard at the person sending it either. A little thing called privacy? Customers tend to value that. And they put that stuff on the Internet these days, you know? If they’re not satisfied, they’ll write us up. If it gets out that we’re not treating their stuff the way we say they do . . .”

“Come on, I’m sure you can tell me something about the man who sent it.”

“Are you with the police or something?” he asked, getting more nervous by the second.

“No. Not police. Just someone who’s really interested in finding the man who sent this.”

“Look, man,” he said, “all we need is a name and a signature, and those you’ve got on that envelope there.” That he did. The name on the package was James Helfer. Shepard had halfheartedly looked it up in the database and found only two in the city—one who was eighty-four years old, and another who was seven.

“You took the package from him, didn’t you? Is there a rule against describing him for me?”

“Technically, no,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t cost me my job if someone finds out.”

“Nobody’s going to find out,” said Morgan. “What harm could it be? Look,” he went on, lowering his voice, “the thing is, I’m a PI. This guy’s been blackmailing my client. It’s a thing from his past, nothing major, just a minor indiscretion, but it could cost him his job and his relationship. If you come through for me here, it could make a big difference in this guy’s life.”

“Look, man, I don’t want any trouble. I’m not supposed to be giving out customer information like this. It could cost me my job.”

“What if I sweetened it a little more?” Morgan offered him another fifty. The man hesitated nervously. “Hey, this guy’s a blackmailer. Do you really want to go out of your way to protect him? Scout’s honor, nobody ever finds out about this.” He took out another fifty and offered it to the man. “Come on. Take it. All I want is a description.”

The courier looked around again, then took the money without looking down and stuffed it into his shorts. “He was a small guy. He was wearing a Yankees hat and big sunglasses, but I could tell he looked Chinese or something. Young, I think. Like under thirty. Black hair, looked like it was cut short, like a couple inches.”

“Anything else?” said Morgan.

“That’s all—no, wait. I just remembered. He had this bandage on his forehead, just peeking out under his hat. I swear I saw a little bit of red, like there was blood seeping through.”

“What do we make of this?” said Bloch, standing at the head of the conference table in the war room at Zeta headquarters. Morgan was sitting at the table, along with Shepard, O’Neal, and Bishop. Shepard, wearing the same plaid shirt over a grey graphic tee he’d had on the day before, had his face buried in a laptop, as usual. Bishop had pushed his chair a few feet away from the table, and sat with crossed arms and extended legs. Together, they were trying to figure out what their next step would be.

The note that Stuart had passed Morgan had been scanned, and the image was now up on the big monitor. Like the previous one, it contained a date, a time, a location written on it—this time, a restaurant downtown—and a dollar amount. It was much the same as the previous note, except that it demanded fifty thousand in cash, and that it was handwritten.

“I had the computer analyze the handwriting,” said Shepard. “But it won’t help very much unless we have something to compare it to, which means it will not help us find our guy.”

“Did you gather anything at the address he provided for the handoff?” Bloch asked Bishop, who’d been down to scout the place.

“It’s an Asian cuisine place,” he said. “It’s nothing fancy, and there doesn’t seem to be anything shady about the people who run it.”

“Their finances are clean,” said O’Neal, resting her chin on her hand with a sigh. “Nothing fishy in their income taxes, at least, and the cash flow seems pretty standard for a business that size.”

“So there’s nothing special about this location,” said Bloch, walking pensively along the length of the table, her heels clicking on the dark stone floor. “What do we make of the fact that the note was handwritten?”

“It’s definitely far more personal than anyone in this situation should be comfortable with,” said Bishop. “Not what you’d expect for a guy who prizes anonymity so much. But maybe there is some upside to the handwritten note that we’re not seeing. . . .”

“Hard to see what that would be,” said O’Neal. “If he’s got access to the same typewriter, why make it different?”

“You’re assuming he did have access to it,” said Morgan. “You’re looking at this the wrong way. The bandaged forehead, the courier delivery, the new number. And look at this handwriting.” He pointed at the screen. “It’s shaky as all hell, written in a rush. This doesn’t have any of the careful style from before. No, something’s different. Something’s happened. Gone wrong. He’s lost his footing. He no longer has some of the resources he had before. For some reason, he can’t go back to wherever he stored that typewriter.”

“So, what?” said Bishop, sitting up and leaning forward, suddenly interested. “You think the feds caught up with him or something?”

“Not likely,” said Shepard flatly, without looking up from his computer. “There’s nothing up on the system. My guess would be someone on the other side of the law is after him.”

“So the fact that he’s still trying to get this money means he’s desperate,” said Bloch.

“That would be my guess,” said Morgan. “Something happened, and he needs the money. My guess is that he needs to disappear off the face of the Earth, and fast.”

“Which means . . .” started Shepard.

“. . . that we need to capture him,” said Bloch, setting two hands down on the table and looking at the assembled team intensely. “And we’ll have exactly one shot to do it before we lose him for good.”

CHAPTER 22

New York, January 28

They had prepared for the operation as much as possible given the time constraints. They had each separately scoped the place, which was a small unpretentious family-owned Vietnamese restaurant called the Lucky Noodle. It wasn’t normally too busy, they found, but hardly ever empty either. It wasn’t the ideal spot, but it had no security cameras. There were also two ways in and out, the front and the back, and the street outside was clearly visible from the main dining room inside. The tac team, however, had it all covered. There was no way they’d lose him if he went into that restaurant.

Morgan arrived early in his GTO. Diesel had parked a truck overnight across the street from the place. They timed it so that he pulled out just as Morgan arrived, leaving an ample parking space behind. Morgan was going to hang back on this one, act the lookout and wheelman so they had somewhere to usher their target when they got him, and be ready to give chase if he had to. It was a long wait, during which he sipped on hot tea from a thermos and pretended to read a newspaper he had propped up on the steering wheel, but kept an eye on the street. It was just after 11:30, late enough that the restaurant was open but early enough to miss the lunchtime crowd. Finally, he saw Rogue walk by and then enter the restaurant through the front door. A few moments later, giving no indication that they were together, Bishop did the same.

Morgan tapped his fingers against the newspaper, using the rearview mirrors to keep an eye on the streets. “Bishop,” he said, after counting a few minutes, “is your team in position?”

“Affirmative,” he said. Morgan saw him, through the window of the restaurant, sitting at a table by the door, pretending to do the New York Times crossword. Rogue would be seated at a table near the rear exit of the restaurant, out of Morgan’s sight, making sure no one went out that way. Morgan could see Diesel at the street corner in workman’s overalls, drinking hot coffee and making a show of rubbing himself from the cold and looking impatiently at his watch. Spartan was behind Morgan a ways, leaning against the outer wall of a convenience store pretending to have a conversation on her cell phone.

“All right, Len,” Morgan said into his comm. “Get a move on.”

“Okay, okay. I’m coming.”

“And act natural. Don’t speak to me unless you’ve got a gun in your face, understand?”

Two minutes later, Len Stuart turned the corner and walked down the sidewalk, carrying his briefcase full of cash. He seemed even more nervous than the first time, ambling awkwardly and looking down. He entered the restaurant and took a seat by the window. A waitress came to bring him a menu, which Stuart took without thanking her.

It took another seven minutes until their quarry appeared. “There’s our guy,” said Morgan. He had rounded the corner behind Morgan, visible in the left-side mirror. He was much like the courier had described. Thin, not very tall, unmistakably Asian, and while he was still wearing a baseball cap, this one sporting I LOVE NY, the bandage was just visible on his forehead. “Ten seconds to visual contact.”

“Copy that,” said Bishop.

Morgan watched as the man approached the restaurant and peeked inside through the front windows. He examined suspiciously all the people on the street and the restaurant, including the members of the tac team, but must have either been satisfied by what he saw, or been desperate enough to risk it, because he went inside.

“Visual,” said Bishop in a whisper. “Waiting for the trade.” There were a few seconds of silence, then Bishop spoke again. “He’s getting up. Front exit.”

Diesel and Spartan began converging toward the restaurant to intercept him. They reached the door almost simultaneously, just as it opened. Their quarry, who walked out holding Stuart’s briefcase, seemed to notice what was happening almost immediately. He tried to back up into the restaurant, but bumped right into Bishop, who grabbed him by the arm. He seemed to reach into his pocket with his free hand, but Bishop took his wrist before he managed to grab whatever he was reaching for.

“There’s nowhere to go,” Morgan heard Bishop say over the comm. “We know you’re desperate. If you come with us and cooperate, we can protect you.”

There was a moment of hesitation, and then Morgan heard the man’s voice in his earpiece. It was hushed and filled with terror. “No one can protect me.”

“I guarantee you’re better off with us than alone,” said Bishop. Then he said, in a markedly less friendly tone, “Do you really need more enemies at this point?

“Who are you?” he asked.

“The good guys,” Bishop said. “The guys who are willing to offer you protection if you cooperate.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You really don’t want to refuse,” Spartan said, and the way she said it almost gave Morgan chills. She could be very convincing when she wanted to be.

There was a moment of hesitation, and the man, apparently weighing his options, said, “Okay. I’ll come.” His voice sounded small and defeated.

They began walking out of the restaurant together. However, at that moment, a silver Mercedes blocked Morgan’s view. It seemed to slow down, and for some reason that set off alarm bells in Morgan’s mind. Not fast enough.

Four shots sounded, and the Mercedes peeled out. As it sped away, Morgan saw the man they had come to collect on the ground, his face a bloody mess, legs twitching on the pavement. Rogue had staggered back, clutching his chest, but there was no blood on his shirt—the vest had caught it. He’d be fine. But the Asian man, the one they had come to take in, was dead, and with him died their last lead. Except—

Morgan turned his head just in time to see the Mercedes turn the corner.

They had one chance to catch the killer.

Morgan turned the key in the ignition, and the engine rumbled like the low growl of an angry lion. He stepped on the accelerator, maneuvering hastily out of his space, and then stepped on it. The GTO lunged, doing zero to sixty in just under five seconds.

CHAPTER 23

New York, January 28

Morgan wove through traffic as he followed the Mercedes SLK around the corner. He drifted on the turn, narrowly avoiding a car on his left, and then floored the accelerator.

The Mercedes had already reached the next corner, and Morgan saw it just as it disappeared, turning left. Not that he needed to see the car to know where it was going. The guy in the Mercedes could drive, and he wasn’t going to put those fancy skills to use in Manhattan traffic. There was only one direction he could be going where he could use his skills behind the wheel to get away. He was going toward the West Side Highway.

Morgan dodged traffic, trying to shave off precious seconds from his lag behind his quarry. Four city blocks went by in a blur. He turned screeching onto the West Side Highway, and saw the Mercedes speeding, about ten cars ahead. Morgan weaved through the intervening cars, horns blaring as he cut drivers off. But the Mercedes was doing the same, widening the gap between them. Morgan gripped the wheel and floored the accelerator, and the GTO’s engine roared.

As he drove furiously, dodging cars as they came at him in a deadly game of tag, Morgan couldn’t help but feel this heightened awareness, the rush of the chase. This was his inner predator taking over. It was Cobra asserting himself over Morgan. It was thrilling beyond anything else. The speed got his adrenaline pumping and made him hyper-aware of what has happening in front of him. This was driving. This is how this car was meant to be used.

“Cobra, come in,” said Bishop through the comm. “What’s your position?”

“I’m on his tail,” said Morgan. “West Side Highway. Can’t talk.”

He was closing in now, but keeping up while avoiding collisions was getting trickier by the second. The driver in the Mercedes was leaving a mess of cars in his wake, slowing down and veering unpredictably as he cut them off. Morgan almost crashed twice, and then was almost sent into the guardrail by an errant sedan.

Then, ahead, he saw that a heavy red SUV was slowing down warily after the Mercedes passed him, slowly closing the gap between it and a truck in the next lane. Morgan was going too fast to brake, and hitting the SUV or the truck at his speed wouldn’t be too different from hitting a brick wall head-on. There was only one way to go. He accelerated harder toward the narrowing gap. Scraping paint against the truck’s back fender, he made it through. But immediately, he saw a car that was braking hard, tires screeching, just up ahead. He cleared the truck with inches to spare. Immediately he was faced with a compact car that had spun out, and he banked hard to the left, nearly losing traction himself.

At that point, Morgan noticed that all this chaos wasn’t accidental. The driver in the Mercedes wasn’t just cutting it close trying to get ahead. The bastard was trying to cause an accident by getting as many cars as he could to brake, spin out, or crash.

Morgan followed, dodging car after car. They covered ground astonishingly fast. They passed a policeman who started giving chase, but was trapped almost immediately behind two slow-moving vehicles and was left far behind, siren fading in the distance. Morgan turned his attention back to the Mercedes, and noticed the highway was nearly over, feeding into the George Washington Bridge, a long, curving on-ramp with nowhere else to turn.

Morgan’s tires squealed as he drifted the entire length of the on-ramp onto the bridge, not a hundred feet behind his quarry.

He made it almost halfway across when the Mercedes narrowly cut off a car that was pulling a trailer. The car tried stopping, skidded sideways, and with the trailer, blocked Morgan’s passage altogether.

Morgan pulled the handbrake, but too late: he smashed sideways into the trailer, which caused him to spin counterclockwise. Moving too fast to regain control, he spun, until Morgan felt the jerk of a hard impact and blacked out.

He opened his eyes again, disoriented, not knowing how much time had passed and feeling like he was on a boat. He looked out ahead, and saw no road, just the sky. Suddenly, he realized why: the GTO was hanging over the edge of the bridge, teetering uncertainly over the abyss.

Morgan was groggy, but even in this state he understood the need to get the hell out of there. He undid his seat belt with far less care than was necessary, and the car rocked a little farther forward. From his perspective it seemed as though the whole world tilted, giving him a clear view of certain death below. Slowly and carefully, Morgan began to move to his right, keeping his weight as far back as he could, until he was holding himself above the handbrake. He slowly pushed himself backward, squeezing between the two front seats and onto the backseat. The car seemed to stabilize as he did this, resting more comfortably on solid ground. The back window had shattered at some point, and the glass on the seat bit into his hands. Struggling to focus, he climbed out the window, and pulled himself clumsily onto the trunk lid, feeling the broken glass making a thousand shallow cuts on his side. He then rolled off the trunk and onto the hard asphalt, crying out in pain at the impact.

Without Morgan’s weight to hold it back, the car tilted forward to its tipping point. With a loud moan, it tumbled off the bridge, disappearing from sight and smashing into the Hudson River below with a distant crash.

Bruised and beaten, Morgan slowly got up, then looked down the length of the George Washington Bridge. Traffic had stopped completely behind him, and a crowd of people, having left their cars, began to form around him. He looked to the far side, trying to spot the Mercedes, but there was no sign of it. Wherever it had gone, it was far out of sight by now.

CHAPTER 24

Washington, D.C., January 29

Chapman walked out into the National Mall again, this time by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It was midafternoon. The temperature was dropping fast, and the reddening sky made the water seem like it was on fire. He stood there for hardly two minutes, feeling his limbs grow slightly numb from the cold, before he spotted Smith walking toward him in his precise and controlled gait, wearing a discreetly tailored black trench coat. The mysterious man had left him with a promise last time and nothing more. Since then, the Emergency Task Force’s investigations remained perfectly stalled. They had scrupulously analyzed all the evidence relating to the Paris bombing, including security video, interrogation transcripts and forensic reports, but they had yielded nothing. The handful of promising leads had only led to dead ends. Every other source had dried up, and Chapman clung to the hope that Smith would deliver something.

“Hello, Mr. Chapman,” said Smith, in his enigmatically blank tone. In his gloved hand was a paper shopping bag with the name of a bookstore on it.

There was something about this Smith that made Chapman nervous. Frightened even. The way that he was calm and pleasant unnerved him. Here was a man who worked behind the scenes in a seat of global power, and he seemed perfectly tranquil and at ease. Chapman had the sense that Smith could be facing an armed terrorist or the President of the United States, and he would still maintain the same placid demeanor.

“Okay,” said Chapman. “I got your message. I’m here. Now tell me why.”

“As it happens,” said Smith, looking into his eyes, “I have something for you, Mr. Chapman.”

“Tell me it’s good.”

“You’ve been impatient,” Smith said, noting his tone. This ticked Chapman off.

“No shit, I’ve been impatient. We’re after a goddamn mass murderer here. Probably more than one. Time is somewhat of the essence.”

“I’ve been holding nothing back, I assure you,” said Smith. “I’ve come to you with this now because I did not have it before.”

“And what do you have for me, Mr. Smith?” All this cryptic talk was seriously getting on Chapman’s nerves.

“Motive. It seems someone has been profiting from these attacks. Profiting a great deal, I might add.”

Chapman furrowed his brow. “How?”

“Someone has found a way to beat the stock market, after all,” he said.

“Are you saying that someone is doing this to game the financial markets? That’s what all this death is about?”

“Some might call it an investment strategy.”

“Surely there are easier ways to make money,” said Chapman, turning sideways in disbelief.

“We are talking about a truly staggering sum,” Smith said flatly.

“Right,” said Chapman. “I’ll take your word for it, provisionally.”

“There’s no need. All the proof you will need is in this dossier.” Smith lifted the shopping bag and offered it to Chapman, who took it. Its contents were heavy, and he felt in his hands that there was a book in it.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll look through it. But you can’t be giving this to me for no reason.”

“You’re right about that,” said Smith. “Although I assure you that at least part of the reason is that you have the resources to properly look into this. I have no interest in seeing this violence go on.”

“I see,” said Chapman, thin-lipped. “But you still want something in return”

“Why, yes,” said Smith, with a subtle smile.

“And what is that?”

“Information. A first look into whatever you find.”

“Suppose you don’t get it,” said Chapman. “Suppose I use this, and give you nothing in return. What happens then?”

“I trust you will see the mutual gain to be had from our relationship, Mr. Chapman.”

Chapman sighed audibly. “What’s your game, Mr. Smith?” he asked. “Who do you work with?”

“As soon as we start using a name, Mr. Chapman, we give people a way to talk about us.”

At that, Smith turned to go. As Smith took his first steps away toward the Lincoln Memorial, Chapman said, “Mr. Smith, what is the Aegis Initiative?”

Smith turned around. He showed barely any sign of having been stirred, but Chapman saw a slight tension around his lips and eyes that gave him away. Still, with the calmest and most self-assured tone of voice, he said, “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Chapman.” He turned again and walked away.

Chapman, left alone, did not move, but instead looked in the bag. He pulled out the book that had been stuffed into the bag to give it volume, along with the much thinner dossier. He looked at its cover. It was titled, An Illustrated Guide to Conspiracy Theories.

Cute, thought Chapman as he turned his back to the Memorial and walked away.

CHAPTER 25

Boston, January 29

“So what do we know about this guy?” asked Morgan, referring to the man whom they had intended to capture, but instead had allowed to be killed right under their noses.

He was in the Zeta Division war room with Diana Bloch, Lincoln Shepard, and Karen O’Neal. They were all seated around the main table, and an air of defeat hung like a thick cloud above them.

“Marcus Lee, twenty-eight years old,” said Lincoln Shepard, glancing at his screen for reference. “Child of immigrants from China; father deceased, mother had not heard from him in just under two years, although deposits have been made regularly in her bank account, to the tune of ten thousand a month, presumably by Lee. Graduated MIT with a bachelor’s in mathematics, where he wrote an award-winning paper on predictions in financial markets.”

“I remember reading it in graduate school,” said O’Neal. “The guy was some kind of genius. And I don’t say that lightly.”

“After that, he went the Wall Street route,” Shepard continued. “Made his first million in his first year, then, as far as we know, dropped off the face of the earth.”

“When, presumably, his work turned toward the illegal,” said Bloch.

“There’s no way of knowing,” said Shepard. “But it would make sense.”

“Karen, have you made any headway with the list this time?” This was the list of investment tips that Lee had put together for Len Stuart, which he had intended to deliver the day before.

“I’m running simulations. I’ll let you know as soon as we get something.”

“How do we even know we can use that list?” said Morgan, to no one in particular. “This was the last time he planned on selling this stuff. He was planning on disappearing off the face of the earth. If he gave his clients a fake list, there’d be nothing anyone could do. How do we know that the list is even the real thing?”

“That’s the problem with desperate men,” said Bloch. “They are completely unpredictable.”

“As I see it,” said O’Neal, “if he was desperate and rushed, he could have done one of two things. First is, he picks the list out of a hat. Completely at random. Not a problem if he’s running away and leaving his clientele behind. But that actually takes marginally more work than just handing over the list he has, assuming he had one. I’d say my best guess is, fifty-fifty, that this list is worth something.”

“The problem is, will we know the difference?” asked Bloch.

“We will,” said O’Neal. “The computer’s running my model. If it finds any significant coherence to it, we’ll know.”

“Good,” said Bloch. “How soon until we know?”

“Could be a few minutes, could be a few hours,” she said.

“All right,” said Bloch. “I think we can take a much needed break. Shepard, come with me. I have something to ask you.”

Morgan found himself sitting alone at the table with Karen O’Neal, who slumped in her chair red eyed, staring off into nowhere.

“Tired?”

“You have no idea,” she said. “Although, maybe you do. Like we get to complain, the home squad here. It’s not like they’re shooting at any one of us in here.” She rubbed her temples. “Christ. My brain is just shot to hell.”

“It must be torture,” said Morgan. “Having to wait for results all the time. I don’t know what to do with myself if I can’t do something.”

“Honestly?” said O’Neal. “I’m glad for a little respite. I feel like I haven’t been away from my computer in days. I’m starting to see numbers in everything. They’re running in my head when I close my eyes, just running across my field of vision. God, I’m boring you out of your mind, aren’t I?” She smiled, a tired smile with heavy-lidded eyes.

“I wonder what that’s like,” he said. “Seeing the world like you do.”

“It’s alienating. You just don’t see things like other people. So a lot of the time, you don’t think like they do, you don’t talk like they do, and you end up saying the wrong thing. I’ve gotten better about that, but it’s still an issue.” She smiled to herself, as if remembering a private joke. “This one time, on a date, I told a guy that he had the exact same nose-to-eye proportion as Adolf Hitler.” She burst out laughing, an exhausted laugh, and Morgan joined in. “As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well.”

“So I take it there’s no one special in your life?”

She shrugged. “What can you do, with a job like this? I pretty much live here these days. No joke. There are a couple of dormitories over by the server room. I’ve spent every night this week so far sleeping back there—and ‘sleeping’ I’m talking here in purely relative terms, because I don’t think I shut my eyes long enough to qualify as real sleep.”

“Must be lonely,” said Morgan. “That kind of lifestyle.”

“I guess sometimes I prefer to keep my own company. How about you? Is the mighty Cobra married?”

“Almost twenty years,” he said, with more than a hint of pride in his voice.

“But no wedding ring?” she asked. “I mean, I get it. You can’t wear it here. I didn’t expect that you would wear a wedding ring. But you don’t have a mark either. You know. Suntan mark, or a depression in your skin. There’s nothing there.”

Morgan rubbed his ring finger where the ring was absent.

“I take it off. Whenever I’m not home. I’d rather no one know that I’m married.” He was already regretting opening up even to O’Neal.

“If you only put it on when you’re at home, how do you tell which one is the disguise?” A silence stretched out between them, and then she laughed again. “Just listen to me. What am I saying? Sorry. That went too far.” There was a ding, and she looked at the laptop that had been set up on the table. “We’ve got results!” she said.

“I’ll get Bloch,” said Morgan. But he didn’t have to. She had been in her office, overlooking the war room, and she had seen and was already on her way down. O’Neal, meanwhile, was scrutinizing the data on the screen.

“What do we have, O’Neal?”

“It looks here . . . We’ve definitely got something. It looks like he’s betting on—cable news outlets tanking?”

“Shepard, I want a list of major cable news buildings, and I want it an hour ago. Karen, I want all the affected companies, and anything else you might have. Let’s get this son of a bitch this time.”

“Boss,” cut in Shepard. “We don’t have to do any of that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know where they’re going to hit,” said Shepard. “There’s a conference under way. Executives from all the major channels are getting together on this mega yacht, Martha’s Vineyard to New York City.”

“Oh God,” said Bloch.

“And there’s one more thing,” said Shepard. “Tomorrow they get off the boat. It’s going to happen tonight.”

CHAPTER 26

Long Island coast, January 29

Young Alison Bernadette Wiley was bored out of her mind.

The Mirage was supposed to be some kind of wonderland. It was much smaller than a cruise ship—she’d been on one of those too, and hated it—but it was still plenty big. There was a heated pool and constant all-you-can-eat buffets and annoying monitors who were supposed to make sure that you were having fun every single minute of the day. She’d stay in the cabin if her mother let her, but even the big ones were cramped. Meanwhile, it was absolutely freezing outside, and reading, the only thing that could distract her meaningfully, made her seasick.

Her dad was there for work, of course. He was always off somewhere working and her mother with him, doing shopping, judging from the suitcases of new clothes and shoes and trinkets she always brought home. At least they usually had the sense to leave Alison at home, where she had friends and all her stuff and her cat, Pierre.

But this time, they’d informed her that she would be coming along.

Her mother had taken away her e-book reader for the night. It had been the only thing that was making the whole trip tolerable for Alison, who was now forced to endure the evening without it. “Go and be social,” her mother had said. “There are plenty of other kids your age here. Why don’t you make some friends and tell me all about it later?”

So here she was, at the most pitiful excuse for a dance she had ever seen. The boys were all off to one side, looking at the girls, who were standing precisely opposite them. On the dance floor were only a handful of monitors, trying to drum up enough enthusiasm and unsuccessfully pulling reluctant kids to dance with them. Lame eighties music was playing, and there was a disco ball and colored lights reflecting on the walls, which despite the trappings looked nothing like they belonged to any kind of nightclub. It just looked like a rec room with the lights out.

Alison decided to walk out and be alone. At least there she wouldn’t be bored and pressured into pretending like she was enjoying herself. And after a while, she’d go back to the cabin anyway. One of the monitors called out to her as she walked away, “Hey, leaving already?” She murmured a “Be right back” and slunk out anyway, bringing her heavy coat and mittens with her.

There were a couple of older kids making out on one of the deck chairs, so she walked farther away, where she wouldn’t see them and they wouldn’t see her. Here, the fun Nazis wouldn’t see her and force her to participate in any activities—she realized how much she had come to dread the word in just two short days. It was cold out there. Freezing, actually. She wondered who had had the stupid idea of having a stupid cruise in the middle of winter. She looked out at the land, just a couple of lights far away and barely visible. She wondered if the people there could see her too, and if they were as bored as she was. Then she lay back on one of the deck chairs and looked up at the sky. The ship wasn’t moving because of the party, so mostly it was nice and still, except for the gentle bobbing from the waves. She looked for familiar constellations.

She took out her smartphone to look them up. She had an application that had all the constellations, on both hemispheres, and which could even identify them through the camera. She tried using it, but it needed to connect and she couldn’t get a signal. Weird, she thought. It had been working fine before, and the ship wasn’t moving at the moment.

That’s when she realized that there was a helicopter coming out of the darkness to land on the boat.

CHAPTER 27

Long Island coast, January 29

Morgan felt the rumble of the Embraer military cargo plane in his bones and checked his watch. Five minutes till the drop.

“Time to strap on the gliders,” said Bishop. Morgan and the three other members of the tactical team present, Diesel, Rogue and Spartan, motioned to indicate they understood. This wasn’t going to be a rehearsed grab of an unarmed civilian. They were dropping into an unpredictable situation with armed hostiles. Morgan would never do this with a team he didn’t trust completely. As he sat there, feeling the deep rumbling of the aircraft resonate throughout his body, he felt glad that he had these people by his side. They had seen action together before. They knew the signals and each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and knew how to work together like a well-oiled machine even in the absence of a definite plan.

“Cell phone and VHF radio signals on the boat just went dead,” said Shepard over the comm. “Can only be a jammer, meaning hostiles are on the boat. I repeat: hostiles are on the boat.”

Great, thought Morgan. “Any risk of us losing communication?” he asked.

“Negative,” said Shepard. “We’ve got spread spectrum transmission. Communicators should work fine.”

With little time to prepare or coordinate, they had taken the few minutes they had on the ground to stretch and warm up, standing right next to the aircraft that was to take them. The plane was a black behemoth with downturned wings with twin jet engines. And goddamn, the son of a bitch could move once it was up in the air.

They were going to do a HALO jump—High Altitude-Low Opening. This meant they’d have to descend the better part of twenty thousand feet with their parachute still tucked in their bags. But they weren’t going to do it unaided.

“Suit up, everybody,” said Bishop. Morgan took his Raptor glider and began to strap it on as the rest of the team did the same. This took a few minutes as they fiddled with the harness so that they were properly fitted, but soon enough, they were ready: five soldiers geared up to tear through the air to their target.

“All right, it’s drop time,” said Bishop. The cargo door opened with a loud whir of the engine, and ice-cold wind flooded the cabin.

Zeta team took position and dropped off the back, disappearing into the night one at a time: Spartan first, then Rogue, then Diesel.

“You’re up, Cobra,” said Bishop.

Morgan pulled down his helmet. The night vision came online simultaneously with the HUD overlay, showing a grid over the terrain. The boat required no overlay. It shone bright on the vast expanse of the ocean, visible even at such a high altitude. The other members of the tac team around him were colored blue in his display. It was a necessary precaution. Without it, they might easily hit each other, which could send two men in a tailspin into deadly cold water.

Tactical team Zeta circled the target below in their gliders. Morgan’s HUD told him they were losing altitude fast. The winds near surface level were mild tonight, so they would not need to fear drifting off course after activating their parachutes. Getting closer to the ship, he could see a shape like a huge black beetle on the deck of the mega yacht. A chopper. He glided to the other end of the boat, the aft deck. As he drew closer, he saw two men in black holding a rifle, patrolling the deck.

Morgan glided in circles above the ship, careful to keep a safe distance from the others. Even though the yacht wasn’t moving, and as enormous as it was for a yacht, it was still a relatively tough target to hit from the air. He made his way down in a matter of minutes, so that he was within range of deploying his parachute. He sailed over the boat, trying to bring his speed to a minimum. He timed it so the two men patrolling the deck were on its far side as he approached. He pulled the cord for the parachute, and the glider broke loose from his back, though still attached to him with a rope. The chute deployed, yanking him upward and arresting his fall. He drifted down, sailing above the boat, aiming for a spot of clear deck. A sudden gust of wind carried him farther than he intended, and sent him sailing toward one of the armed guards. The guard looked up and then called to the other, pointing straight at Morgan, who could see the whites of their eyes. He had been spotted.

They would shoot Morgan as he was passing over them, and there would be nothing that he could do, except maybe . . . He looked down, and did some quick mental math. The men took aim with semiautomatics. He pulled the emergency release just as bullets started flying. Freed from the parachute, he fell precipitously, and the bullets sailed over him. He hit the deck rolling, and searing pain went up his bad leg. But before the men could react, he pulled his handgun and shot one of them between the eyes.

There was the matter of the second man, however, who was now taking aim. Morgan had no time to fire back As he braced for the impact of the bullets, the man was taken down by a hail of gunfire that came from somewhere to Morgan’s left. He saw Spartan running toward him, holding her weapon of choice: an AR-15 she had nicknamed Mandy.

“Thanks,” said Morgan. “I owe you one.”

“Damn right you do,” she said. “I just saved your ass.”

“Perimeter secured,” said Rogue.

“Come together on me,” said Bishop.

They moved stealthily, covering each other as they did. Once together, they moved across the deck in formation.

“There’s their chopper,” said Diesel.

“They’ll have heard us,” said Morgan, “Wherever they are. We’ve got to take cover.”

Morgan heard the sound of a chair scraping on the deck behind him, and he turned around, gun cocked. What he found was a little girl looking up at him. She’d been hiding in a sconce on deck.

Morgan looked up at the rest of the team, and saw that they were looking at Spartan.

“Hey,” said Spartan, “Don’t look at me. I don’t know how to talk to kids!”

This was taking too long. “Hey,” Morgan said to the child. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I think I should be,” she said. “I’d never seen people shoot guns before. Did you come to rescue us?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what we’re here for. What’s your name?”

“It’s Alison.”

“Alison, where is everybody?”

“They’ve got all the passengers trapped inside, on the upper deck. My parents are there. Are you going to help?”

Morgan nodded. “Leave it to us,” he said. “You should go back to hiding. It’s not safe for you to be out here. You’ve been very brave, Alison.”

She just nodded vigorously. “Please. Please save them.”

She scurried off, and the team ran to take cover by the stairwell to the upper deck.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” said Bishop. “We go for the passengers first. If their intention is to massacre everyone, our mission ends there. But if they’re planning to sink the whole ship, we move down to vital systems. It’s most likely they’d be targeting the hull. Shep?”

“I’ve marked the most vulnerable spots on the map,” broke in Lincoln Shepard through the comm. “I can give you directions from here.”

“All right. Upper level. Rogue, find a vantage point and back us up. Cobra, you run lead. They’ll be expecting us, so this is going to be tricky.”

All but Rogue moved in synchrony toward the upper deck, Morgan and Spartan through the nearest stairway, Bishop and Diesel up the other. Reaching the upper deck, Morgan noted that the ballroom had windows all along its four walls, and Morgan had to crouch down to avoid being seen. He walked along the outer wall of the ballroom when he reached a door and peered inside.

The boat’s ballroom was decked out in the finest linens. Each table had a towering centerpiece blooming with white flowers, and there was a stage over on one end. All the passengers and crew were huddled together on the dance floor. There were sobs coming from the crowd.

“Who’s out there?” yelled a man with a Russian accent, standing at the door. “We have hostages. Show yourselves with your hands up and weapons on the ground.”

“Rogue, do you have visual?” asked Bishop over the comm.

“Affirmative. Three hostiles. One by the door, two more hiding among the hostages.” The one who had yelled out did not dare come outside, and seemed to be taking what cover he could.

“I want you to incapacitate the farthest on my mark,” said Bishop. “Cobra and Spartan, take the one closest to you two. Diesel and I will deal with the other. In position. move out.”

It all happened in an instant. Spartan threw in a flash grenade. Morgan heard the buzz as Rogue’s bullet whizzed past him, and the tinkle of broken glass as it tore through the window. At that, Morgan rolled sideways into the ballroom and put a bullet in the closest man’s forehead. The one that Rogue had hit was on the ground, his leg bleeding. He yelled out in pain as blood poured from his wound. The other, closer to the far door, had been taken out by a bullet from Diesel’s rifle. There was screaming among the passengers, and some began to stand up and look for the exits.

“Let’s move in,” said Bishop. “Spartan, give me crowd control. Cobra, with me.”

“All right, everyone,” Spartan yelled out, her strong voice carrying throughout the ballroom. “We are here to save you. Calm down. Everything is okay and under control. That’s it, nice and easy. Everyone find your family and stay put. Are Alison’s parents around here somewhere?” A woman in a short black dress and dazzling jewels stepped forward, and then a man with carefully coiffed brown hair and striking blue eyes raised their hands. “Oh God, is she all right?” said the mother.

“She’s fine, ma’am. I just wanted to tell you that she’s a hell of a girl.”

As the passengers moved around, slowly at first but more and more agitatedly, Morgan followed Bishop to the injured guard.

“Move and you die!” said Bishop, training his semiautomatic on the man, whose gun was still within reach. He kept one hand on the ground, which kept him propped up, and raised his other in surrender.

“Cobra,” said Bishop. “Get him outside and away from these people. And patch him up. I don’t want him bleeding out before we interrogate him.”

The man looked up defiantly, but Morgan could clearly see the fear that ran beneath. He crouched down and helped the man up, and they hobbled together outside. Morgan used plastic cuffs—they took up little enough space that everyone on the team always carried them on a mission—to tie his hands to a brass railing along the edge of the deck, and sat him on the floor. He ran down to the lower deck to his glider and took out the first aid kit from the storage compartment. Coming back up, he cut open the man’s pants around the wound. It was a nasty one. Bone had clearly been shattered. If he survived, he’d probably lose that leg.

“What are you doing here?” Morgan asked him as he pressed down on the wound to stanch the blood. “What’s your mission?”

The man did not speak, but from the way he stared, Morgan knew that he had understood. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with a thin beard and an ugly face, with a tiny, thin nose and a thick forehead.

“Are you with Novokoff?” he insisted.

“He is not here,” said the man.

“That’s not what I asked,” said Morgan, pressing down on the wound harder than he needed to and making him wince in pain. “Did he send you here?”

The man kept quiet. Morgan began applying a tourniquet around the leg. The man cried out as he tightened the strap. This part was painful enough that Morgan didn’t have to do anything else to worsen the pain.

“You’re not leaving this boat,” Morgan said as he worked. “You didn’t kill the passengers, which means you were planning on sinking the boat. And if it sinks, believe me, you’re going down with it. Is that worth it? Are you really that loyal that you’d give your life for him?”

The man looked doubtful. He looked even less sure when he saw Bishop, Diesel, and Spartan approach them. It was clear that he was not, in fact, loyal enough to die for Novokoff.

“It’s going to sink, isn’t it?” Morgan insisted. “How are they going to do this?” The man hesitated. “Tell me or we all die!”

The man bit his lip and looked down, wincing in pain. “They are going to use explosives. Blow up the hull. The ship will sink fast, and everyone will die.”

“Where are the explosives?”

The man bit his lip. “Below deck. There will be two charges. One by the crew’s quarters and another one in the engine room.”

“Got that, Shepard?”

“Working on a route,” he replied.

“How many men?” asked Bishop.

“Just one,” he said. “The rest of us were in charge of securing the passengers.”

“How long until the bombs blow?” Morgan asked.

“Ten minutes,” the man said, looking at his watch.

Bishop immediately sprang into action. “All right, let’s move out,” he said. “Rogue,” he said into his comm, “keep the deck secure and keep an eye on our prisoner. Cobra, you think you can deal with disarming a bomb?”

“With my hands tied behind my back.”

“Good. You and Spartan take the engine room. Diesel and I will take the crew’s quarters.”

Spartan led the way aft, down the stairs to the lower deck.

“A lot of big talk, but I sure as hell hope you can deliver, Cobra.”

She went first into the hatch, and he went in after her, bounding steps at a time and narrowly avoiding banging his head against the bulkhead. His footsteps reverberated far with a resounding metallic noise.

“So much for stealth.”

As if on cue, Morgan heard gunfire from up ahead. He spun out of the way, hiding behind a metal pillar. Morgan pulled a flash grenade from his belt and signaled to Spartan. He tossed it, and as soon as they heard the bang, they pivoted into position and opened fire. Spartan fired and missed, but the man dropped to the ground when Morgan sunk several bullets into his chest. As he approached the fallen man, Morgan saw that he wasn’t quite dead.

“Novokoff . . .” The man coughed a wet, bloody cough. “He beats you. . . .”

“What? What are you saying?” asked Morgan.

“You will not find him in time. . . .”

“What the hell do you mean?”

The man just smiled a bloody smile.

“What do you mean?”

The man’s eyes went wide, his pupils became tiny dots, and he began seizing.

“Cobra,” said Spartan. “The bomb.”

Morgan looked at the device. It was stuck to the yacht’s outer hull. The timer read 6:22, and was counting down. He recognized the explosive agent as Semtex. He examined the device carefully, looking at how the wires were arranged.

“Shit,” he said.

“What?’ asked Spartan.

“It’s a difficult setup. Any tampering might blow us all to high heaven.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“My best,” he said. He probed the bomb carefully, but all he had were some wire cutters and a screwdriver from his standard field kit. He began to unscrew the casing from the electronic component of the bomb. He knew that it was rigged to blow if he just pulled it out. As he unscrewed the casing, he noticed a strange resistance.

“There’s an anti-tamper device inside,” Morgan said. “It’ll blow if I open it.”

“Well, then, what are you going to do?” asked Spartan.

Morgan looked at the timer. Going on less than two minutes. “Diesel, how are you coming along there?” he asked.

“I found the device, but I’m still working on it,” he said. “Gonna be another couple of minutes, I suspect, but I got this. There?”

“Still working too,” he said.

“Cobra, can you do it?” she insisted.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You’d better get out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere if you’re not,” she said. “Better work fast. We’ll never get those people out of here before the ship sinks.” Morgan didn’t have time to argue, and he was glad to have her near him anyway. He continued to examine the bomb, but every passing second told him he wasn’t going to make it, he wouldn’t be able to disarm it before the time ran out.

Morgan had a sudden flash of inspiration. The bomb was tamper-proof, but the straps tying it to the hull were rigged with a simple anti-tampering device. All he had to do to pull it free was to connect two wires together and short out the larger circuit. He stripped the wires bare near their base with his pocketknife. From there, it was simple to cross them and pull the bomb loose from the ship’s hull. He took it into his arms and turned around.

“What the hell are you doing?” exclaimed Spartan.

“Saving the boat,” he said. He ran up back the way they had come, Spartan coming behind him, until he reached the deck. He clutched the bomb in his arm. The weight felt about right, and the shape was not entirely different. He raised the bomb, focusing on making the longest pass he had ever made as quarterback.

Morgan threw it as hard as he could into the black void of the open ocean. His old football arm still served him well, and the bomb sailed far away. He heard it as it fell into the water. Almost immediately, there was a flash, a burst, and water sprayed on his face. The yacht bobbed with the shockwave on the water, but otherwise, they were home safe. The boat was intact.

“Nice throw, Cobra!” said Spartan.

“Yeah . . .” he said.

“Why so glum? You did it! We’re safe!”

“Didn’t you hear what Novokoff ’s man said before he died? This isn’t over. And I get the feeling that we haven’t even seen the worst of it yet.”

“What? What do you think it might be?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m going to find out.”

CHAPTER 28

Montauk, New York, January 29

Private Corvey looked at the Montauk Air Force Base building and shuddered. The boxy construction with that enormous radar mounted on top of it was still catching the rays of the sun, which had, from his perspective, already disappeared behind the forest of Camp Hero State Park. The sun was low in the sky, and cast a red shroud on the entire scene. The only sounds were the cries of the occasional seagull, the crashing waves and the rustle of the needles of evergreens swaying to the wind.

A big part of his job was just intercepting snoops and sending them away. The base was a favorite destination among conspiracy nuts. The enormous radar tower, with its impressive antenna, was more than enough to excite the imagination to create a lot of crazy ideas. People believed all sorts of things about it, ranging from its being used for mind control to being retrofitted as part of some sort of massive laser weapon. And those were sane theories. Others talked about time travel and space aliens. So, inevitably, the crazies would come prodding, trying to prove the existence of the evil secret plots of the U.S. government. But crazy as they may be, no one really wanted to argue with his automatic rifle. Oh, they hollered to heaven almighty that this was an outrage, that the government wouldn’t get away with this, that all the newspapers would be alerted. But they always left.

Those were the exciting moments. For the most part, nothing happened. He spent his time either standing at his post or walking on patrol, looking at the square old concrete buildings or the greenery of Camp Hero State Park.

And this day was no exception. Not a soul stirred, not even a squirrel. Corvey walked among the buildings, with his rifle, held at low-ready position, weighing heavily in his hand and neck. He saw one of the other privates on patrol that day, Orr, about a hundred feet away, and raised his hand to greet him. He walked on, down the road and past the old WWII bunkers. He absently fingered the emergency alert device strapped like a pager to his belt. The existence of the device was enough to make him apprehensive. He was supposed to activate it on the event of a “serious emergency.” He had no idea what that might entail, and of course, no one would tell him.

He looked back at the radar tower. Today, the whole thing was a rusted hunk of metal that groaned when strong winds hit. Definitely no space lasers here. The truth was much more prosaic. Originally built in the Cold War era, the radar was part of the SAGE program, meant to detect approaching bombers. The base itself was older—built during World War II to detect passing U-boats. Nothing out of the ordinary here.

Except Private Corvey had seen things since he’d been stationed at Camp Hero. Men going in and out of the main building of the newly reinstated base in the dark of night, from boats that made shore in the middle of moonless nights—and then no one coming outside, not one, except in those clandestine midnight ins and outs. And on the really quiet nights, he swore that he could hear very faint and distant screaming. It might not be space lasers, but something was going on in there, underground.

Covey looked at the building again, and once more got a chill up his spine. The sun had fully set now, and darkness was beginning to encroach. Just a couple hours more, he thought to himself, and he would be relieved.

He heard a strange rustle in the bushes, and stopped dead in his tracks.

It had been soft, but his ear was trained to hear this sort of sound, and pick it out from the mere rustle of the wind. He gripped his rifle harder in his right hand, and fingered the emergency call button with his left. Oh hell, he thought.

“Who’s there?” he called out. “Orr? That you?”

He heard another rustle. Definitely too big to be a squirrel. He felt his heavy nervous breathing, his heartbeat picking up speed.

“Come out with your hands up!” he shouted.

There was no answer. He held his rifle with both hands and raised it. “Come out with your hands up or I’ll shoot!”

He didn’t have time. Muzzles flashed from three different places in the bushes. He felt the impact of three bullets hitting his vest, knocking the wind out of him. One bullet hit his neck, two his left arm, and two his right thigh. He dropped on the cold hard ground, feeling the dirt against his face.

With the last of his strength, he squeezed the emergency button.

CHAPTER 29

Department of Defense monitoring station, January 29

Private Sanders was puzzling over one of those cutesy, annoying crossword clues with the puns when the buzzing alarm went off. She tossed the newspaper aside and looked at the screen of the computer in front of her. It read, BREACH AT CAMP HERO. She quickly tossed aside the crossword and picked up the phone, making the connection to Camp Hero.

“Camp Hero, this is Crow’s Nest. Do you copy?” She got only static in response.

“Camp Hero, this is Crow’s Nest. Do you copy? I repeat, do you copy?”

She picked up the intercom. “Major Donnell,” she said. “I need you in here.”

He picked up the phone himself and said into the receiver, “Crow’s Nest here. Come in, Camp Hero. Come in.”

It annoyed her slightly that he did that.

“Connect me to this line,” he said, writing down a phone number on the margins of her crossword puzzle. “Sir, shouldn’t we contact the domestic emergency response—”

“I said connect me, Private. That’s an order.” Sanders didn’t like it, but an order was an order.

“Camp Hero has been breached by a hostile force. Requesting immediate response.”

From where she was sitting, Sanders heard nothing on the other end. There must have been silence in fact, because after a few seconds Major Donnell said, “Requesting immediate response on Camp Hero.”

“Has anyone else been contacted regarding this matter?” The voice came out loud enough for Sanders to make it out.

“No,” said Donnell.

“Keep it that way,” said the voice. “Responders will be en route shortly.”

CHAPTER 30

Long Island Coast, January 29

Morgan convened with the other members of Zeta tac team on the upper deck, where the passengers and the captive crew were slowly trickling out.

“Smooth move getting rid of that bomb,” said Spartan. “Hell of a throwing arm you got there.” Morgan shrugged.

“There is such a thing as defusing,” said Diesel, grinning. Out of the corner of his eye, Morgan saw the little girl, Alison, running to hug her mother and father, who had just come outside. Many people were huddled together, crying, while others seemed energized by the relief of being alive.

Morgan looked down and saw their prisoner, slumped on the ground looking relieved, clutching his broken, bleeding leg. He walked over to him with a sense of purpose.

“You know,” Morgan said, looking down at the man, “there was something your friend said to me below decks. About something else that’s going down tonight.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, wincing in pain. His hands were still above his head, tied fast to the railing of the ship.

“I’m sure,” said Morgan. He bent down, putting his hands under the man’s arms. “Get up.”

“Where are we going?” he asked, concerned, but still using his one good leg to push himself up.

“Better to ask where you’re going,” he said. Then he heaved the man over the railing. With his hand still cuffed, his arm cracked audibly from the sudden impact of his full weight, but the cuffs managed to hold him up, dangling over the side. He screamed.

“Cobra, what the hell are you doing?” demanded Bishop.

“Questioning the prisoner,” he said. Then, to the man hanging overboard, he yelled, “Where’s Novokoff?”

The man just grunted in pain. “I do not know! I swear!”

“That’s mighty cold water down there,” said Morgan. “And I don’t know how long those handcuffs are going to hold you. If the bones in your hand break, I get the feeling it’ll slip right out, which means you take a little dip in the drink.”

“Pull me up! Please!” The man dangled helplessly over the water.

“Cobra, pull him up!” cried Bishop. “Rogue, Spartan, help me out here.” Then again to Morgan, “He’ll be questioned once we’ve brought him in.”

“We killed one of Novokoff’s men near our bomb,” said Morgan, blocking their way from pulling the man up. “He said something. He said we couldn’t beat him. That we wouldn’t be able to stop him. And I think this bastard knows what that’s about.” Morgan looked over the railing at the dangling man. “Tell me what I want to know!”

“He’ll kill me!” the man said. “Novokoff will kill me if I say anything.”

“I’ll kill you,” said Morgan.

The man looked at the others, Bishop, Spartan, Rogue, and Diesel, all of whom were looking over the railing down at him. Spartan turned to wave people in the crowd away. “You cannot let him do this!” said the man. “Stop him!”

No one made a move to help him. “See?” said Morgan. “Turns out I can do this. And no one’s going to question one missing goon. Now talk.”

“Okay! Okay! He was planning something else. Something soon,” said the man.

“What is it? When does it go down?”

“I don’t know! He did not tell anyone who was not assisting him directly. But he referred to it as his primary mission tonight.”

“Primary? What the hell could be more primary than this? Bloch, are you receiving? Guy says Novokoff is planning another strike tonight.”

“I know,” she said over the comm.

“What do you mean, you know? How?”

“Because it started fifteen minutes ago. I just got the call. He’s invaded a top-secret installation. He’s after something. Something far more deadly than anything he’s had in his hands so far.”

“Shit,” said Morgan. “Where is this installation?”

“Montauk Point.”

“That’s only some fifty miles from here,” said Diesel. “Bloch, where’s our transport?”

“En route,” said Shepard. “You’ll be picked up in twenty minutes.”

“That’s not soon enough,” said Morgan. “That time could make the difference between catching him and letting him walk free.”

“Well, what the hell other choice do we have?” asked Bishop.

Morgan looked around, and then the answer became crystal clear. “The chopper,” he said. “We’re taking the chopper.”

CHAPTER 31

Long Island coast, January 29

The helicopter sped along over black water, with Diesel in the pilot’s seat and Morgan riding shotgun, with Rogue, Spartan, and Bishop taking up three of the five seats in the back. The chopper was a Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk. Cousin to the Black Hawk helicopter, the Seahawk was a multipurpose military aircraft. Morgan had flown them before, and he recognized the displays and controls in front of him, but Diesel was the better pilot, so Morgan let him take care of the flying. Bloch briefed them over the comm as they glided over the black water, toward the distant lights at Montauk Point.

“It’s an underground facility, in every sense of the word,” she said. “It’s top secret, with only very, very few high-clearance personnel who know about it.”

“How come you know so much about it?” asked Spartan.

Bloch ignored the question. “It’s also literally underground, with the entrance at the old Camp Hero naval base. Shepard’s working on getting maps and floor plans. There’s a possibility that you’ll need to blow some doors open. Diesel, do you have explosives in your pack?”

“Never leave home without them,” said Diesel.

“Good,” said Bloch. “Have them at the ready.”

“What are we going to find there?” asked Morgan.

“Activities in the base involve advanced research,” said Bloch. “Any information beyond that is above all of your pay grades.”

“Oh, great,” said Spartan. “Chemical weapons?”

“That’s classified.”

“Bloch, we need to know what we’re up against here,” said Morgan.

“My hands are tied, Cobra,” she said.

“What if one of us dies because your hands are tied?”

“The outside door to the base is steel and fifteen inches thick,” she continued right past his question, “which, according to automated security systems, has been breached. That means that the internal security doors have locked down. That’s going to slow down Novokoff and his team, which is good news for us.”

“The hostiles seem to have disabled external communication,” Shepard broke in, “so we don’t have eyes and ears inside as of yet. Diesel, you still have that security bypass in your pack?”

“Got it right here,” he said.

“Good. Install it on the mainframe, and I’ll be able to tap into the facility. The mainframe room is on the first floor down, so that should be the first order of business. Your comms are powerful enough to work up to a hundred feet underground, so we shouldn’t have a problem maintaining contact. Once Diesel gets that device set up, I can clear the way for you.”

They had been approaching land for a few minutes, and now their destination loomed near. Morgan could clearly make out the satellite dish, illuminated in the darkness, like a beacon, a lighthouse giving them their heading. “Coming up on the target,” said Diesel. “Everyone, get ready for a rough landing. We don’t know what we’re going to find down there, but my guess is that it won’t be a welcoming committee.”

Diesel brought them nearer to the clearing around the facility. There were two men in black down there, each with a MAC-10 in his hand. They sent a hail of bullets, and Morgan heard dull metallic thuds as the bullets hit the side of the helicopter. A red light began flashing inside, and the chopper bucked. Spartan slid open the side door, and a violent gust of wind filled the helicopter. They began to shoot off the side of the chopper. The men ran for cover.

“Bringing her down now!” shouted Diesel. The chopper descended, heaving and bucking, and finally touched the ground.

“Move out!” shouted Bishop. They streamed out of the side as Morgan and Diesel kicked open their respective doors.

“Got visual, in the tree line,” said Rogue.

“Cobra, Diesel, flank,” said Bishop. “Rogue, see if you can get a visual on them. Spartan, cover fire.”

Morgan ran to the right of the chopper while Spartan shot a hail of bullets toward the trees. There was return fire, and Morgan heard a bullet buzz right past his ear.

Morgan heard a single gunshot that he identified as coming from Rogue’s H&K, and one of Novokoff’s men tumbled to the ground. The other ran and disappeared into the trees. A few moments later, Morgan reached the tree line. He took cover behind the trunk of a tree, then cautiously looked around. The darkness and the foliage provided plenty of cover—and if the man wasn’t visible, then neither was Morgan. He skulked closer to where the man had disappeared. And then he heard a twig snap, no more than a few feet ahead of him.

He got behind a tree and held his breath. The man hadn’t seen him. Morgan could hear him breathing, scared. He was walking in Morgan’s direction. He waited, and then, when the man was mere feet away, Morgan emerged and fired.

Click. Jammed.

Just as the man, wide-eyed, began to raise his MAC-10 to shoot, Morgan smashed the Uzi into his face, then brought his foot down on the back of the man’s knee. The man fell to his knees. With a quick, fluid move, Morgan pulled his knife from his boot and drove it into the man’s neck. He gurgled, and blood welled from his mouth, as he fell face first on the ground.

“All clear,” he said. The Zeta tac team made their way over, and Diesel knelt down and examined the communication device in the man’s ear. “These are limited range,” he said. “They won’t reach Novokoff if he’s underground.”

“That means he won’t know we’re coming,” said Bishop. “We’ll have a chance to sneak up on them.”

“Let’s move on, then,” said Morgan. “The facility’s waiting for us. And this time, let’s catch the bastard.”

CHAPTER 32

Montauk, January 29

Led by Bishop, Morgan, along with Rogue, Diesel, and Spartan, made his way inside the abandoned building that held the gigantic radar array. Inside, it was mostly a rundown, abandoned concrete building, with crumbling walls and a cracked ceiling, vines and grasses slowly intruding to reclaim the space for nature. Everything was perfectly normal except for an enormous hatch on the ground, its metal cover large enough to hold a car, hanging open and exposing a wide stairwell that descended into gloom. The Zeta tactical team went down the stairs and through a short corridor to find a thick steel door, which looked like it led to a walk-in bank safe, melted right off its hinges with explosives. Morgan could still detect the pungent scent of gunpowder lingering in the air. On his right he saw a complicated console that was undoubtedly used for identification, now laughably superfluous. The gaping entrance where the door used to be revealed a small atrium with flashing fluorescent lights and two doors. One led to the elevator, and was marked as such. Another had a symbol that indicated that there were stairs.

The elevator call button and the door to the stairwell each had a key-card reader next to it. Diesel pulled out from his pack a piece of equipment that consisted of a magnetic key card attached by wires to some kind of transmitter. He inserted the key-card end into the slot next to the stairwell.

“All right, Shep,” said Diesel, “we’re connected.”

“Opening . . .” he said. Some fifteen seconds elapsed. There was a buzz, and the light next to the key card went red. “Weird.” After a few moments, there was another buzz, and the light flashed red again.

“There’s some kind of block on the other side,” said Shepard. “Hardwired. Novokoff had someone who knew what he was doing. I can’t get you in through that door.”

“Does that mean we’re stuck?” asked Bishop.

“Maybe not,” said Shepard. “Diesel, try the elevator door.”

Diesel inserted the device into the elevator door slot.

“I get the feeling the elevator won’t be working,” said Morgan.

Then there was a buzz. This time, the light flashed green, and the elevator doors slid open. In front of them was the deep dark shaft, lifeless except for faint noises of footsteps reverberating from below.

“Tell me why we aren’t waiting for them up here,” said Morgan. “There’s only one way out. We can ambush them right here and have a much better chance of taking them all out and all making it out alive.” Spartan gave him a look as if she agreed, but said nothing.

“There may be survivors,” said Bloch. “There are few who know the details of what happens in this facility, and it is likely no one on the outside knows anything in any kind of detail. We are going to need survivors to help preserve the knowledge of things inside this facility.”

“Just what the hell haven’t you told us about what’s down there, Bloch?” Morgan demanded.

“Cobra,” said Bishop. “This is not the time to dispute orders. We do what we’re told, and that’s the end of it. Get your ass in position. We’re going in.”

Spartan, who had been securing the rope to a sturdy exposed pipe a little ways up the stairs, was now in position. She was the first to rappel down.

“Okay,” said Shepard through the comm to the whole team. “Remember, the mainframe will be on the first floor down. Get in there and patch me in.”

Morgan took the rear. He waited as the others dropped down, keeping an eye on the stairway to the surface while clutching his Uzi. After Bishop disappeared into the shaft, he waited for the double pull to the rope that indicated that he had been disengaged. Morgan strapped it to himself and eased himself into the shaft. It smelled musty and chemical all at once. From the depths of the elevator shaft, straining his ears, he heard a muffled inhuman shriek reverberating upward.

Morgan reached the door onto the first level underground and swung out onto the ground. The first thing he noticed was broken glass clinking and crunching under his feet. On the floor were the corpses of two facility guards, in grey and black. The overhead lights were off, with only the scant fluorescent emergency lights illuminating the cramped underground spaces. From the elevator foyer, there was a short curved hallway with an electronically sealed steel door at one end, and an open one at the other. On the wall right across from the elevator door, Morgan saw a symbol he recognized, and it sent a chill down his spine. Extreme biohazard. He could still hear the faint screams down below. What the hell was this place?

The first floor down had its own little atrium with a single door to the stairs, clearly marked that they only went up, not down, and another door to the facility itself. The group had already made its way through that door, except for Rogue, who had waited for Morgan to make it down. They proceeded together, and Morgan found a hallway that stretched to his left, curving inward toward the elevator. There were two doors along the side of the hallway, one toward the center of the curve, marked MAINTENANCE, and another outward, marked MAINFRAME. At the far end of the hallway was another door, shut tight. The key-card reader next to it had been opened, and loose wires hung from a hole in the wall.

“All clear,” said Spartan, from down the hall.

“All right,” said Bishop, then emerging from the maintenance door. “Rogue, take the rear. “

Diesel examined the gutted panel. “There’ll be no getting this one open from this side,” he said. “It’s shot to hell.”

“To be expected,” said Shepard over the comm. “Don’t bother blowing it. Use your explosives to get to that mainframe. Once you’ve patched me in, I’ll get it open remotely.”

Diesel examined the mainframe door, knocking on it at various parts. It made a solid metallic sound.

“Steel,” he said. “Multiple-bolt locking system. Key-operated, as a fail-safe in case of mainframe failure. I’ve got . . . fourteen bolts, plus we’ve got to consider that those hinges are reinforced steel too.”

“What does that mean?” asked Bishop.

“It means we’re going to need a hell of a lot of explosives.” He began to apply a sticky white paste from something that looked like an oversize tube of toothpaste to certain spots on the edges of the door.

“Be careful with those explosives,” came Shepard’s voice over the comm. “Don’t damage the mainframe.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” said Diesel.

Morgan leaned back against the wall as Diesel worked. He looked at Rogue, who was fidgeting nervously. Morgan sympathized. Waiting in such a high-adrenaline situation was especially excruciating. He looked over at Spartan, but she had perfected the dead-eye approach to danger, one which he imagined she had learned rather early. She knew how much she’d hear if the only woman on the team was the one caught being nervous about a risky situation.

“All right, everybody take cover!” said Diesel.

Morgan and the others went around the corner and Diesel pushed a button on his remote detonator. There was a muted burst, and then a loud metallic thunk as the door fell to the ground. They all made their way back toward the door, which was now just its jamb on the wall. He saw the smoke that remained from the burst, and the charring around the spots where the plastic explosives had been. As he got closer, Morgan felt chill air coming from the dimly lit, newly opened room. He peered inside and saw a million LED lights, constant or blinking at various intervals, a mass of cables running between terminals or into the wall. The nerve center of the entire facility.

At that moment, Morgan heard the heavy scraping of metal against metal, then a resounding bong. Morgan’s ears popped.

“What the hell was that?” asked Rogue.

They ran toward the source of the sound, and found the way to the elevator blocked by a heavy metal door that had apparently dropped down from the ceiling.

“What’s happening?” asked Shepard.

“The doors!” cried Spartan. “The blast doors! We’re shut in!”

Bishop ran to the blast door and examined it. “Diesel, can you blow this open?” he asked.

“A door like this?” said Diesel, looking at it and tapping on its surface. “It would take a hell of a lot more explosive than I have on me. Not a chance.”

“Shep, is there another way out?” asked Spartan.

“No,” he said. “You’re blocked from the stairs too. Just sit tight. Diesel, tap me into the mainframe so I can get those doors open.”

Diesel made for the mainframe room, while the rest of the team spread out along the corridor. As they saw Diesel disappear into the room, there began a low intermittent beep coming from unseen loudspeakers which sounded suspiciously like—

“Is that an alarm?” said Morgan.

“What is that, Shep?” asked Bishop.

“Hold on, hold on! I’m looking through the facility specs.... Let’s see, alarm, alarm—oh. Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh? What the hell do you mean, uh-oh?” said Morgan.

“You guys had better get a move on,” he said, with urgency in his voice. “Diesel, get me into the mainframe!”

Diesel moved forward, bringing his bag with him into the refrigerated room.

“What the hell do you mean, uh-oh?” yelled Morgan.

“Apparently there’s a security system to save the mainframe,” said Shepard. “To prevent any damage to it. If there’s sign of fire in the proximity, the facility locks the doors and—”

“And?”

“Pumps the room full of inert gas. Most probably argon, although I’m not exactly certain.”

“Oh, great,” said Rogue.

“Argon . . . is that poisonous?” asked Spartan.

“No, not exactly poisonous,” said Shepard. “It’s what’s known as a noble gas, which means it won’t react with anything at all. It won’t specifically cause any damage to your bodies. It’s just going to replace all the air in the room and make you suffocate. You should have an estimated . . . three minutes until the oxygen concentration reaches critical levels.”

Bishop, Morgan, Spartan, and Rogue looked at each other, alarmed.

“Keep your heads as high as you can,” said Shepard. “Argon’s heavier than air. It’s going to be concentrated closer to the floor. You can avoid the effects for longer if you’re not as close to the ground. By the same token, getting too low can be fatal.”

Morgan seemed to feel a difference in the air around his feet, although it might just as well have been all in his head.

“Diesel!” cried Spartan. “How about you get that mainframe thing done so that we don’t all die?”

“Working on it!” he said.

“Work faster!”

“Do you want to come in here and do this!” snapped Diesel.

“Anyone else getting a little lightheaded?” asked Rogue. Morgan couldn’t quite tell if it was the tension of the situation, but his arms suddenly felt heavy and his knees weak. His eyelids, too, seemed to want to close on their own.

“All right, I’m in, Diesel,” said Shepard. “Just hold on tight, you guys. I’ll get the argon filtered out in no time and get you proper air in there.”

“Not exactly going anywhere here,” said Morgan, his vision swimming. The others seemed to be losing their balance. To Morgan, it seemed like the whole world looked askew.

“Okay,” said Shepard. “Draining the room of argon now.” When he listened for it, Morgan heard the whir of several exhausts. “I’ve got air being pumped in. You should be able to breathe freely in thirty more seconds, just hold on.”

At that moment, Rogue dropped to his knees. Morgan looked around and saw that Spartan and Bishop were both slumped against the wall. He had to get Rogue up, and the others weren’t alert enough to help. He fought through the haze in his mind and stumbled over to Rogue. He grabbed hold under his armpits and pulled. It was as though Morgan’s arms were completely unresponsive. Everything was so heavy, if only he rested for a second . . .

He steeled himself against those thoughts. They were fatal at a moment like this. With all the strength he could muster, he pulled Rogue to his feet.

“Breathe, damn it, breathe!” Morgan tried to say, but it came out garbled. He could feel his own mouth slow down. He slapped Rogue’s face to wake him. His eyes opened slightly, and he mumbled something incomprehensible, delirious.

Morgan suddenly lost his balance and fell with his side against the wall. His legs seemed to be giving out. The effort of pulling up Rogue had left him winded. He seemed to be sliding down, lower, closer to the ground. Toward death, little by little. If only he could stay up a little longer . . . if only he could—Morgan blacked out.

He woke up with his face against the vinyl floor to the sound of Shepard’s voice in his ear saying, “Come in . . . Bishop, Cobra, Spartan, Diesel, Rogue. Come in, Zeta.” Slowly, Morgan caught his breath, and his mind cleared. Alive. He was alive. The others, Bishop, Spartan, and Rogue, were standing, but still not entirely aware. He heard footsteps coming from behind him. He stumbled to his feet, and saw that Diesel had come out of the mainframe room, his steps still shaky and uncertain. “Diesel here,” he said.

“Report in, Diesel,” said Bloch. “What’s happening””

“They’re here,” came Diesel’s groggy voice. “Cobra’s down, I don’t know, he’s—”

“I’m alive,” said Morgan, his voice husky and slow.

“We’re all alive,” said Bishop. His voice seemed to be clearer than the others’. He extended a hand to Morgan, and helped him to his feet. His legs felt wobbly and still a little numb, but Morgan found that he could stand on his own.

“I’m glad you all made it,” said Bloch, “but now you need to keep moving. You don’t have a lot of time.”

Morgan just wanted to curse at her, but he knew she was right. “Let’s get going. Shepard, what’ve we got? Are you getting that door open for us?”

“Okay, security systems online,” said Shepard. “Getting video feeds. Okay. Looks like they just reached level five. There are four of them. That includes Novokoff. God, they killed everyone in the entire facility. There’s bodies everywhere, I think—wait! It’s not everyone. There’s one still alive! Man in a lab coat. Can’t miss him.”

“Your priority is to get him out alive,” said Bloch. “Do you copy? We need him alive.”

“Do they know we’re here?” asked Bishop.

“Doesn’t look like it,” said Shepard. “They’re moving full steam ahead.”

“You heard Bloch,” said Bishop. “We’re going down. We get the scientist out alive.”

They went through the previously impassable door, which led them past several other doors, marked with different administrative functions, and finally to a stairwell as curved as the corridor they had traversed. They went down, their submachine guns at the ready. They had to walk over dead bodies of guards and scientists that had been mowed down by Novokoff and his men. The air got colder and colder as they went down, flight after flight. This stairwell apparently led all the way down. They passed a door on each level, labeled with a number, until they reached level five. This one was marked again with a biohazard symbol. The door opened for them as they approached.

“They’re all the way around the facility from where you are,” said Shepard. “If you split up here, you can come at them from both sides.”

Bishop signed for Morgan and Rogue to go down a corridor on their left. Then, he motioned for Diesel and Spartan to follow him on the right.

Morgan took the lead with Rogue behind him. “All right, Cobra and Rogue, go down the hall. It’ll be about three hundred yards.” They ran down the corridor, passing the dead body of a guard and at least a dozen staff as they went. To their left and right were doors with signs that said things like DNA LAB, X-RAY CRYSTALLOGRAPHY, and ELECTRON MICROSCOPY. They heard the echoes of their boots as they ran. They heard something else too—the unearthly screaming, much louder now. It wasn’t human, Morgan could tell, and it was several voices shrieking over each other. They were running toward the source of the sound.

They were three quarters of the way through the corridor when Morgan heard gunfire. “They’ve engaged the enemy!” said Shepard. “Cobra, Rogue, get behind them! You can flank them and cut off their retreat! Here, go right on this next door.”

The door was marked with a sign that read LIVE SPECIMEN LAB. “Let me open that for you,” said Shepard, and the door slid open. The screaming, which had been muffled and distant, suddenly grew sharp, loud, and close. This room was some kind of changing room for hazmat suits, with another door to their left. Beside it was a sign that read, in large, bold letters, HAZMAT SUITS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. The door led into an airlock, with a second door leading somewhere unseen. Both doors to the airlock opened simultaneously.

“I’m really not liking all this stepping through airlocks,” said Morgan. “There’s got to be a damn good reason why this is here.”

“Sorry, Cobra, but we can’t afford to take those kinds of precautions now,” said Bloch. “Bishop and the others need your help.”

Morgan signaled for Rogue to follow and cover him. They passed through the now-open airlock together into an anteroom and into the clean area.

The barrage of bullets came hard and fast, from a door straight ahead. It was one of Novokoff’s men, clad in grey. Morgan didn’t have time to see anything other than the barrel of his gun before pivoting out of his line of fire.

“Shepard, get this door closed!”

The door slid shut, and the light on the handprint panel turned red. It was a heavy, solid door, and it would hold the man on the other side. Morgan turned to face Rogue.

He was on the ground. Blood, looking black on his black gear and bright red on the white floor, seeped from a wound from his neck.

“Agent down,” said Morgan. “Repeat, agent down. Rogue is down.”

“Shit, Cobra,” he said, dazed. “I got hit. They got me.”

Morgan knelt down and looked at the wound. It looked bad, like it had gone deep into his chest cavity. He pressed on the wound with his hands, and blood bubbled up around his fingers. Rogue’s breath was coming in ragged wheezes. “Aw, this is nothing, Rogue,” he told him.

“I’m gonna die, Cobra. Don’t lie to me. This”—he indicated the wound with his eyes—“people don’t survive this.”

Morgan didn’t have anything to say to that. Rogue was right. He was going to die.

“I remember you saving me,” he said. “Up there. I would have suffocated if you hadn’t gotten me up. Guess it didn’t do much good, did it?”

There was gunfire off behind them.

“Go,” said Rogue. “They need you.”

“I’ll come back for you,” said Morgan. “We don’t leave a man behind.”

He nodded. “My name,” said Rogue. “I want you to know it. My name is Ryan Sanford. I’m from Lebanon, Missouri.”

“I’ll remember, Ryan Sanford from Lebanon, Missouri.”

Morgan stood up and clutched his submachine gun.

“Rogue’s down,” he said. “I need another way into that room.”

The answer came in a door opening to his right. “Take that way,” said Shepard. “It’ll take you through the monkey lab, and you can get the drop on them.”

“Monkey lab?” asked Morgan. There was no answer, and he set off.

Morgan walked through a room that contained an examination table with leather hand and foot restraints, about right for a chimpanzee, as well as a large Plexiglas cage. The next room, through the door on his left, had to be the monkey lab.

So this was the source of the screaming. In the room, there was a row of cages containing chimpanzees, twelve in all. Their shrieking just grew louder and more frantic when Morgan entered the room, and some began throwing themselves against the Plexiglas doors to their cages, leaving blood smeared on the clear surface. One door led to a small supply closet, which seemed to hold food, syringes, other supplies, and a refrigerator full of tiny vials of medication.

Novokoff burst suddenly into the room, holding a small steel case by its handle, along with another man in grey and another in a lab coat, whom Morgan presumed was the scientist Shepard had talked about. Not a fight he could win on his own, especially without harming the scientist. Morgan spun into the supply closet. He reached for his flash grenade, and then remembered that he’d already used it.

“I need help here!” he said.

“He’s locked us out, Cobra!” said Bishop. “We’ll go around, but it’ll take us a minute. You’re on your own for now.”

Great.

“Drop your gun and come out or we kill the scientist,” said Novokoff.

“Do not let him die, Cobra!” said Bloch.

The chimps were screaming bloody murder.

“You need him too,” Morgan yelled to Novokoff.

“Toss it now!” came the answer.

“Shepard,” he said in a low voice, “do you have video on them?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Good. I’m going to need you to tell me exactly what they do in the next few seconds, understand? If they move at all, you tell me.” Morgan unslung his submachine gun and pushed it out into the middle of the room, where it slid to a stop.

“The handgun too!”

He cursed to himself and did the same to his Walther.

“They’re coming your way!” said Shepard.

Morgan took his combat knife from his boot and twisted out from the closet. Novokoff’s man, surprised, tensed up and began to raise his gun to shoot, but before he managed to get a bullet out, Morgan threw his knife, which buried itself deep into the man’s chest. He rolled out of the way before Novokoff could take aim, then kicked his left leg sharply. Novokoff buckled and fell.

“Run!” said Morgan to the scientist. “Get out of here.”

Novokoff was reaching for his gun. Morgan rushed and tackled him. They grappled on the ground, then rolled, so that Novokoff was on top. Morgan put his feet on Novokoff’s chest and pushed him away. Novokoff tumbled backwards and landed near Morgan’s Walther. He picked it up, and Morgan retreated back into the supply closet.

“Shepard, open cage 6G!” said Morgan.

“What?” asked Shepard.

“Now!”

There was a harsh buzz, and the Plexiglas door swung open. The chimp went straight for Novokoff, lightning quick. Novokoff fired once, twice, hitting home and sending blood flying, but the animal did not stop. It knocked into him, causing him to fall back, then swiped savagely at his face. Blood spattered on the wall. With the ape on top of him, Novokoff was able to fire one more shot into its torso. A throb pulsed through the body of the vicious creature, and it fell limp and rolled off Novokoff, now croaking a guttural sound and drenched with blood. Novokoff roared in pain, bringing his hands to his face. He was firing wildly, blinded by the blood on his face, and Morgan couldn’t get out in the open and grab his gun. Novokoff managed to get up, take the steel case, and run out through the door Morgan had used to get in.

“He’s moving toward you, Bishop!” said Morgan. He grabbed his Uzi on the ground and ran after Novokoff. He was out the door of the lab when an explosion and a shockwave made him lose his footing. “What the hell just happened?”

“Grenade!” said Bishop. “Shepard, get the door! Close him in!”

“I can’t!” said Shepard. “The door systems aren’t responding. Nothing is.”

“Get him!” said Bloch. “You can’t let him escape!”

Morgan ran back where he’d come from, and caught sight of the rest of the team running ahead of him on the long hallway, with the scientist trying to keep up. Morgan caught up to him first.

“Come with me,” he said.

“Who are you people?” the scientist asked.

“We’re the good guys!” said Morgan. “And we’re going to get you out of here alive. Run! After them!”

Morgan watched as each of the members of the tac team, minus Rogue, got through to the stairwell. Morgan and the scientist were about a dozen yards from the door when it began to descend from the ceiling. It happened too fast for Morgan to think. He pushed the scientist, who tumbled through the door to the stairwell. By the time Morgan recovered his momentum, the door was below his knees. It reached the ground with a deep final clang. It was solid metal.

“What the hell just happened?” said Morgan.

“Self-destruct sequence!” said Shepard.

“What do you mean, self-destruct sequence?” Suddenly the hallway he was standing in seemed very cramped and confining.

“Looks like Novokoff’s grenade tripped it, and the security door closed automatically.”

“Well, cancel it!” Morgan cried, exasperated. “Get that door open and get me out of here!”

There was a pause. Then, Shepard said, “I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“The self-destruct sequence is on a fully local system. It’s meant to work autonomously, so that there’s no way to stop it once it’s started. It was designed that way. That’s probably why I couldn’t access the doors before. Now I can’t get it open.”

Morgan stood and stared at the door for half a moment. Then he asked, “How do I brute-force it then?”

“There’s no way,” said Shepard. “There’s no access to the blast door controls anywhere. I can’t get you out from here.”

“Diesel,” came Bishop’s voice over the comm, “get back down there and get Cobra out!”

Morgan examined the outline of the door, somewhere where he might be able to get some leverage, but the door was sunken in a ridge along the walls and floor. There weren’t any controls that he could see.

“How much time do I have?” he asked Shepard.

“Seven minutes.”

“I’m here!” said Diesel. “What do I do?

“You blast it!” said Morgan. “Like you did the others.” There was a pause. “I could try,” he said. “It’s a pretty goddamn thick door.”

“Shit!” came Spartan’s voice.

“What’s going on?” asked Morgan.

“Hold on,” said Bishop. “We’ve got a problem.”

“What is it?” asked Bloch. “Did Novokoff get away?”

“A little worse than that,” said Bishop. “He locked us in. We’re going to need you to open this up for us, Diesel.”

“I’ve got explosives enough for one door,” came Diesel’s voice.

“We’re not leaving Cobra!” said Spartan.

“There’s nothing you can do!” said Morgan. “Even if you get me out of here, you won’t be able to open that door, which means that even if you get me out, I’m still dead, and so are both of you! Just get the hell out of here! Go!”

“You’re a good man, Cobra,” said Spartan through the comm. Morgan heard the sound of boots on the floor as they ran away from the door and up the stairs.

“Shep, is there any other way out of here?”

“Hold on, let me examine the specs on the self-destruct sequence,” said Shepard.

“I’d really appreciate it if you focused on—”

“This can save you. You won’t have another way out, but I can buy us time. Just let me work.”

Morgan stared down the hall nervously on both sides, then the ceiling. There was nothing there that suggested itself as any kind of solution. He felt like a trapped animal.

“Anything?” Morgan demanded.

“Good news,” said Shepard. “The bombs are primarily incendiary. White phosphorus. They’re meant to cleanse the facility of all biological matter—”

“Last I checked, I’m all biological matter,” said Morgan. “How is that good news?”

“That should keep structural damage to a minimum.”

“So I’ll die, but the facility will be fine?”

“So, the facility won’t come crashing down on you when the bombs go off. If you deactivate the bombs on your level, you can survive the self-destruct.”

“Oh,” said Morgan. “Is there any way we can do that?”

“Okay,” said Shepard. “Let me see. The electric systems for all the bombs on your level go through a single relay. If you cut through that, you can stop the detonations where you are.”

“Okay,” said Morgan. “Tell me how to do that.”

“First, I need you to get to the access door for the upper level.”

“I’m there,” he said.

“Okay, looking at the door, go down the hall to your right, about thirty yards. There should be a panel on your right, at about waist level.”

“Got it.”

“There should be a rubber conduit running through there, about one inch and a half across. Do you see it?”

“Yeah, I see it,” Morgan said.

“Okay, cut through that.”

Morgan reached for his combat knife, and then realized that it was embedded in the chest of a man at the monkey lab. He ran down the hall as fast as he could.

“Cobra, what the hell are you doing?” said Shepard.

“You’ve got just under two minutes to cut that line, or you’re toast! And I mean that a little more literally than I’d like!”

“Got nothing to cut it with!” he said. It took him a full minute to reach the door to the anteroom that he and Rogue had walked through. He went in, and through the airlock, where he found Rogue, lying dead in a pool of his own blood. Morgan saw Rogue’s knife in a holster in his boot, and drew it. Then he turned back and ran.

“Forty seconds, Cobra!” said Shepard. “Get your ass back and cut that line!”

Morgan pushed himself harder than he had ever before. His right knee screamed in pain, and all his muscles burned as he dashed down the corridor.

“Ten seconds!”

He caught sight of the panel ahead. In leaps and bounds and with ragged breath, he reached it, pulled the conduit out enough to get the knife on the other side of it, then sliced through the it and all the wires that ran through it. It was hardly two seconds before the walls, ground, and ceiling shook as something exploded violently above. The lights went out, and the emergency lights came on. The apes in the lab began to screech and wail madly.

“Cobra, Cobra, are you there?” came Shepard’s voice. “Come in, Cobra.”

Morgan dragged the body of the security guard that had been dead near the door and put his hand against the reader next the door. The device gave him clearance, but the door did not open. Instead, there was a low groaning of machinery tugging at a door that would not budge, two sides that refused to separate. The explosion had fused the metal together, making the door as impassable as a wall.

“Cobra, come in, are you there?”

Morgan was stuck. Trapped. Buried. This was a tomb, and he was going to die here.

CHAPTER 33

Montauk, January 29

“Cobra, Cobra, come in,” said Shepard through the comm.

Morgan took a fire extinguisher from the wall and began to beat it against the door. The metal resounded deeply, vibrating to his core, but the blow barely made a dent. Far down the hall, the chimps were screaming still.

He beat metal against metal, again and again. He knew it was futile, it would do nothing, but all he wanted to do was to hit something. He was trapped under rock and metal, with no way out, and it felt like force was the only thing he had left.

“Cobra!” Shepard insisted. “If you’re alive, come in!” He hit until he was exhausted, then he dropped the fire extinguisher and leaned against the wall. Then he spoke.

“I’m here,” he said. “No worse for wear except being buried fifty feet deep. Did the rest of the team make it out all right?”

“Bishop, Spartan, and Diesel are fine, and they got the scientist out too.”

“Novokoff?”

“Escaped,” he said. “Off into the night. He must have had some escape plan already in place, because they found no sign of him anywhere.”

“Is there anything they can do to get me out then?”

“The lower stairs collapsed after the self-destruct sequence,” said Shepard. “There’s too much debris in the way. There’s no way they can get to you without some significant equipment that we don’t have on-site. Sorry, Cobra, there’s nothing they can do right now.”

“I see,” he said.

“Cobra, this is Bloch. Stay calm. We’re going to get you out of there.”

Morgan looked around the hallway, looking more cramped by the second. “Oh yeah?” said Morgan. “How? Are you going to dig me out of here?”

She hesitated. He knew she didn’t have an answer to that. It gave him some hollow satisfaction to catch her in her comforting lie. “We’ll find a way,” she insisted.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he said. “Listen, the rest of the facility’s completely destroyed, right? Even the ventilation system and the air purifiers? Am I going to run out of air here?”

There was a pregnant pause, and then Shepard said, “Actually, it’s not how much air you have in there right now that’s the problem.”

“Well, then what the hell is the problem?”

“You just had incendiary devices go off on every level above yours. Fire. That means that almost all the oxygen in all the other levels has been converted into carbon dioxide. CO_2 is heavier than oxygen, so it’s slowly going to move down to where you are.”

Great. “So how much time do I actually have?”

“An hour,” he said. “Maybe two. It’s hard to tell how airtight the blast doors are. Just sit tight, Cobra. We’ll figure this out.”

Morgan felt a strange calm in being there. An hour of air. Not enough to get a team down there to dig him out, judging by the thickness of the doors. Suddenly, he had time. He had all the time in the world down there. After all, the only thing he had left to do was to die.

He walked down the hall to the lab area, where the dozen screaming chimpanzees threw themselves against the bars of their cages with furious abandon and bared their teeth at him. This wasn’t normal, Morgan thought to himself. Couldn’t be normal. What the hell had they done to the poor beasts? This was no life.

He walked back to Rogue’s corpse, silently apologizing for looting him one more time, and took his handgun. Then he walked back to the monkey lab, and he shot each of the apes in the head one by one. The ones that remained wailed like banshees until he had put a bullet in the last one. What remained afterwards was an eerie, muffled quiet. That gave him a thought.

“Shepard,” he said. “How did the air get down here? There has to be a ventilation shaft of some kind.”

“That’s the first thing I looked for,” said Shepard. “The good news is that they made the shaft big enough for a man to climb.”

“Have I ever told you how much I hate good news, bad news?” said Morgan. “All right, give me the bad.”

“In a facility like this, the used-up air can’t simply go out into the open. The shaft leads up straight into an air purifier. No way for you to get through.”

“What floor is the purifier on?” asked Morgan.

“First. That’s the limit for the biohazard, which is why there’s a different stairwell down to second. But there’s no opening to any areas that lead outside.”

“There may not be an opening. But maybe I have enough explosives to make one.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The incendiary bombs. The ones used for the self-destruct sequence. They don’t explode if they’re separate, but if I put a bunch of them together do you think I can make a blast big enough to get through?”

“Cobra, that’s ingenious!”

“All right, then,” he said. “Let’s get to work. I’m going to need the locations of each of the incendiary bombs that didn’t go off.”

“All right, they’re placed all along the main hallway,” said Shepard. “Each in a panel overhead. You should be able to pry them open with your knife.”

“I see them,” he said. He realized that it was a bit too high for him to reach, so he grabbed a chair from one of the nearby labs. He stood up on the chair and slid his knife under the plate, gently levering it loose. A thin metal plate dropped to the ground. “Got it.”

“Okay, now, you’re going to have to be careful with this part. The device is a disc, some two inches thick, not too different from a landmine. It’s supposed to drop when the self-destruct sequence is activated. It’s attached to a string that’s about half the height of that tunnel. It’s set to go off the moment that string is pulled. You’re going to push aside the bars holding it up, and then gently lower the device until you can cut that string. Understand?”

“Loud and clear,” said Morgan, looking at the grey-green disc above his head. He could feel himself sweating. He pushed the bars aside with his knife, gently and carefully. As soon as he had gotten them clear of the bottom, the disc slipped down and fell. He caught it with inches to spare, the string almost pulled taut. He held the thing for a moment, in pure terror of what had almost happened. Then he cut the string with his knife and climbed down.

“Where’s the next one?” he asked.

Shepard talked him through finding and removing seven more devices from the hallway, which he collected in two neat piles on the floor.

“All right,” said Shepard, “that should be enough. Now, bring them to the ventilation shaft. You’ll find that through a door marked ‘maintenance’ on the main corridor, on the exact opposite side of the door to the stairs.”

Morgan carried four of the incendiary devices with him. “Found it,” he said. He left the bombs on the floor and went back for the rest. He tried the door and found it unlocked. Inside, he found a large metal tube, big enough for a man to fit in, with a bolted door. He opened it. Incendiary devices had clearly gone off in there. The air smelled sharply like burning match heads. He looked up and saw that there was a ladder built into the wall. There were scorch marks all along the tunnel, and the metal had warped and melted on two points along the way up.

“The shaft turns horizontal at the air filters,” said Shepard. “That’s where you’ll want to place those charges. Then, cover the shaft with debris as tightly as possible. You want as much energy as possible directed into that wall.”

Morgan cut off pieces of his shirt with his knife and wrapped them around his hands to climb the ladder. When he reached the top, he found the shelf Shepard was referring to. It was just a few square feet before it fed into a filter. It was impressively free of dust.

“The first-floor corridor will be to your right, through the wall,” Shepard said.

Morgan had to bring up the discs two by two, carefully stacking them together tightly into the sconce. He foraged the lab for something to plug up the hole, and settled on paper. He took several thick reams that he found in an office supply room and carried them up, setting the bombs as tightly against the wall as he could.

“With any luck, that’ll be enough to bust right through that concrete,” said Shepard.

Morgan tied the strings to the explosives together, and then tied that string to a spool of wire he’d found in the maintenance closet. He unspooled the wire all the way down the shaft and then as far as it would go. Bracing for impact, he pulled.

He heard the blast—a series of blasts, in fact, as not all the devices went off at once—then he felt the rush of hot air coming from the shaft. He rushed back into it, finding that there was confetti flying thick down toward the bottom. He climbed up as fast as he could until he reached the top. There was still paper blocking the way, so he pushed it down the shaft. Then he looked at the place where the explosives had been.

There was a hole in the concrete, just big enough for him to squeeze through, and beyond it was a darkened tunnel.

He’d done it. He was saved. “I did it!” He laughed joyously.

“Get out of there, Cobra!” said Bloch.

“Hold on!” said Shepard. “The oxygen levels in those tunnels are going to be critically low. Really, it’s going to be pretty much all carbon dioxide. You won’t be able to breathe until you get back up.”

Morgan took a few deep breaths, then plunged through the gaping hole into the upper level. His vision was a blur, and he noticed that there was thick smoke pervading the entire area. Holding his breath, he ran, remembering the layout from when he’d come in. He ran down the corridor, each step becoming progressively harder, his mind going faint, his limbs burning.

Finally, he reached the outer door, which had been blown open. As he ascended the stairs, he felt the cool night air and took a deep breath. It smelled so sweet, so fresh. He couldn’t get enough of breathing, all of a sudden.

He ran outside, then flopped onto the grass on his back and began to laugh maniacally, completely oblivious of anything else. His eyes stared straight ahead at the open sky. He had never been so happy to see the stars.

CHAPTER 34

Boston, January 30

“How many hostiles were present at the Montauk facility?” asked the disembodied voice coming from the loudspeakers mounted on the upper corners of the room. The voice had the familiar metallic distortion that disguised the voice of the interrogator, who as usual remained behind mirrored glass while Morgan spoke to a video camera.

“Six,” said Morgan. “Two outside, four inside.”

“What is the status of each of these hostiles?”

The Zeta team had remained on site until the cleaners arrived. There had been a dozen men who arrived in a van and a small truck. Six had been in biohazard suits and immediately filed into the building. Four had worked on securing the outside, while two had ushered the team’s survivors into the truck. The inside had been white and metal and entirely antiseptic—probably literally, Morgan thought. They’d sat down on metal benches along the sides and strapped in. Morgan had felt the pressure change in his ears when the doors closed. Negative pressure, he’d realized. If there were a breach, air would move inward, not out. If anything, the cleaners were serious about containment.

“All dead but one,” Morgan told the voice. “Novokoff.”

Morgan had never seen the cleaners in person before. “Confirm that this is Nikolai Novokoff, known Russian arms dealer.”

“Confirmed,” said Morgan.

They’d driven for a few hours. The back of the truck had had no windows, so it had been impossible to tell where they were going. As they moved, one of the cleaners had taken blood samples from each of the team members, neatly labeling each and storing them in a cooler.

“Were there any friendly casualties?” asked the voice.

“One. Code Name Rogue.”

The team had been separated once they had reached a facility located God knew where. There, Morgan spent hours in decontamination, being scrubbed head to toe and taking enough medication to stave off an epidemic. Then he’d been taken back to Zeta headquarters, blindfolded to keep the location of the facility secret. He was now being debriefed.

“Did you witness his death?” asked the voice.

“I saw it,” said Morgan.

“What was he doing?” asked the voice.

“He was providing cover fire for me.”

“Did you observe any breach of protocol or other factor that may have precipitated his death?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you observe any breach of protocol or other factor that may have precipitated his death?” the voice insisted.

“Yeah, I observed something,” said Morgan, getting up and facing the glass. “He was sent down into a goddamn deathtrap! Do you think that might have precipitated his death? Huh? Why don’t you answer a question for a change?”

“Did you observe any breach of protocol or other factor that may have precipitated his death?”

“What was that down there? Who runs the facility? Who the hell are you?”

“Did you observe any breach—”

“I goddamn heard you,” said Morgan, sinking back down onto his chair. “No. There was nothing. He was shot in the line of duty, following orders and covering my ass. There. You happy?”

There was a pause, and then the voice continued, “Did you or any other friendly sustain injuries during the occurrence?”

CHAPTER 35

Turkish countryside, January 30

Dr. Gerhard Vogt looked up nervously from the document he was studying, an analysis of the proteins present in a sample of the organism he was to work with. It was impossible to work like this, under all this pressure. But he had to. He looked nervously at the two young lab assistants, just as nervous as he was. He had to.

Vogt was a mycologist at the University of Mainz—or perhaps it was more accurate to say that he had been. He studied fungal infections, with a specialization in the rare and the unusual. Two months before, the American had come to him with a proposition to come work for him, for less than a year, he had been told. It was an inordinate amount of money, but it was also a huge commitment, which had the potential to seriously sidetrack his career. When Vogt demurred, the American promptly doubled the amount, tripled if he went at once. The university wouldn’t give him a sabbatical, but for that kind of money, he could afford to start his own lab if he wanted to. He was told to choose his own lab assistants, so he extended an offer to two of his best and most promising students, Flora and Julian, to come work for him. They had jumped at the opportunity to do cutting-edge research for pay, both of them being ambitious researchers and completely broke, as students tend to be.

The location had been strange, and had made them slightly nervous. They did not know where they were, except that they were not in Europe anymore, but rather in a dry, rocky area. An advance deposit had been made to each of their bank accounts. Flora in particular had grown suspicious, and her conscience told her that there was something sinister about this. She was not alone in that, but she had expressed the greatest resistance. In the end, however, they had agreed that it was best not to ask too many questions. Such an opportunity did not come along every day, after all.

They had been greeted by the American and another man, the Russian, who himself spoke German to near perfection. The laboratory was something from a dream—state-of-the-art equipment, everything he could have asked for, and everything in pristine condition. It also turned out to be a prison. They had told the guards that they wanted to go home. The guards informed them that they had orders to shoot anyone who tried to leave. They tried their best to ignore the armed guards, but it wasn’t easy to set into a routine, knowing that they were ultimately there against their will. Then came the documents for them to read, all about the fungus they were to work with once a sample came in. It was horrible, and it made them sick. They would, of course, readily work to produce a cure for such a horror. But it was clear that a cure was not what their employers were after.

Flora had refused even to read more of the packets that had been brought. She had decided that she was done with the whole thing. At first she’d made a point of conspicuously staring at the wall, but after one of the guards threatened to hurt her if she continued, she at least pretended to read. Vogt was sure that results would be demanded of him, so he read. And it was while he was reading that the door to the lab opened, startling him.

It was the Russian. He was wearing the same kind of turtleneck he had worn before, and all black. But this time, half his face was covered in bandages, and blood was seeping through them. He did not look happy.

“Oh my God, what happened?”

“Shut up,” said the Russian. “It’s none of your concern. I have a sample for you to work with.” He placed an array of vials kept in a small steel and Plexiglas case. “But first,” the Russian said, “you will check me for infection.”

The information packets had described a test based on a protein that, according to the packet they had been given, was produced by the fungus in the body. Vogt had kept some test solution prepared, knowing that he would inevitably need it. He carefully took some blood from the Russian’s arm and mixed it into four test tubes with a prepared solution, as his two assistants looked on. The contents of each turned blue when the blood was added.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said nervously. “The test is positive.” He winced, not knowing what was coming when he found out.

The Russian responded by overturning the table with the test tubes, which cracked on the floor, tiny shards spreading across the room.

“I want a cure!” said the Russian. “And I want it to be made viable as a weapon.”

“When do you need it?” asked Vogt sheepishly.

“I have no time to waste,” said the Russian. “I want it in two weeks.”

“What?” said Vogt, baffled. “Impossible!”

“You will make it possible,” said the Russian. “If you value your lives.”

Flora stepped forward at that moment. “I will not make weapons,” she said defiantly, her chin up and her eyes holding an expression of righteous anger. “I will not release this abomination on the world.”

The Russian looked at her with eyes of pure fury. He backhanded her across the face. Vogt made a move as if to help, but checked himself, and then looked down in shame. It was hard to be pragmatic sometimes, but he must. Heroics could get them all killed.

“I will not,” said Flora, looking up with the same defiant expression, now sporting a bloody lip.

Wordlessly, the Russian walked to Julian, and motioned for the guard to come forward. The lab assistant drew back at the approach, but did not dare move his feet. The Russian told the guard to hold Julian. The lab assistant could offer little resistance as the much stronger man took his arms in a hold. The Russian took Julian’s hand and produced a knife.

“No!” cried Flora.

“You will do what I tell you, and you will not be a hero,” said Novokoff. “You will do that, or others will suffer.” He took Julian’s pinky, and in a flash, the knife had severed it at the joint. Julian screamed in pain.

The Russian walked out, leaving Julian on the floor, clutching his hand and howling. Next to him on the ground, Vogt saw the dead, bloody finger. Flora, meanwhile, just stared ahead, in blank horror.

CHAPTER 36

Boston, January 31

Morgan’s interrogation at Zeta headquarters took hours, as he went over every tiny detail of what had happened, with the voice. He left the room with stiffness in his legs, which melted away as he walked down a long corridor and then upstairs back to the main level.

He took a shower in the locker room and changed into a fresh shirt and pants that he kept on hand for situations like this. He was going to stay inside, so he didn’t bother to dry his hair all the way—the heat would take care of it. He walked out feeling refreshed. On his way toward the war room, he ran into Shepard, who was escorting the scientist that they had extracted from the Montauk facility.

“Morgan!” said Shepard. “Good to see you up and about. I really thought you were a goner back there.”

“I can’t say the thought hadn’t crossed my mind too,” he said.

“It’s really terrible about Rogue,” he said. “Such a tragedy.”

“Yeah. It was terrible.” The mention of Rogue awoke some anger in Morgan. Bloch had withheld information from them. They’d gone into a deathtrap, and Rogue had paid the price.

“Hey, Morgan,” Shepard said, “this here’s Emmett Pope. You might remember him from the secret underground facility filled with demented monkeys.”

“Apes,” Pope quietly corrected. He reached his hand out sheepishly to shake with Morgan. “I, uh, I think I should say thank you.” Morgan could tell right away that this Pope wasn’t used to talking to people. He seemed to avoid eye contact as much as possible, and spoke like he was mumbling to himself rather than having a conversation. “You know. For saving my life and all.”

“Just doing my job,” said Morgan.

“I’ve never had my life endangered before. I don’t think I like it much.”

“You get used to it,” said Morgan.

He left them and made his way to the war room, then up the curved stairwell to Bloch’s office.

“Welcome back, Morgan,” she said as he walked in through the threshold.

“Why don’t you tell me what the hell that was?” said Morgan furiously.

“Do not take that tone with me, Morgan.”

“I’ll take whatever tone I damn well please. You sent us in there to die. You knew what we’d find down there.”

“I had no idea what the nature of the—”

“You knew they were running experiments with bioweapons, didn’t you?” She remained silent. “What was that place, Bloch?”

“That’s privileged information.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “That was a goddamn government installation. Are we working for the feds now?”

“Does it look like we’re working with the federal government?” Bloch asked pointedly.

“You’re certainly well integrated with government agencies.”

Bloch took a deep breath. “The government is not a monolithic entity, Morgan,” she said. “You know that. There are a thousand competing interests. Functionaries trying to avoid black eyes or public outrage, not to mention those who want to screw someone else. There are things certain agencies would not like known to others. Such rivalries run deep. And we fit into these rifts. By assisting in maintaining certain secrets, we have a privileged position with every agency that we so help.

“The Montauk Project is as top secret as they come. Only a handful of people even knew of its existence. I myself only found out about it when the call came.”

“And what’s it supposed to be?”

“Wasn’t it clear? Biological weapons research. Deadly funguses and bacteria that can be deployed against America’s enemies.”

“And who’s behind this project?” he insisted. “DARPA?”

“Morgan, you know that I can only relay a limited amount of information.”

“Oh, yeah? And what about the fact that they planned to blow the place up with us inside? Was that classified?”

“There was a hierarchy of priorities involved, including saving the facility and preventing Novokoff from escaping with what he’d come for.”

“And where in that hierarchy was keeping me and the tac team alive?”

Bloch looked down, and for a moment, Morgan thought he saw shame. “I’m sorry about that. Truly sorry. I wasn’t informed of the precise nature of what went on in the Montauk facility until after the mission. But you know what the job is, Cobra. You do the mission you’re given, with the information you’re given.”

“That’s not how I work,” he said.

“The mission won’t turn on your whims. You may get a degree of latitude here, but you are not a free agent in this.”

Morgan fumed. She was right, but it wasn’t a fact he was entirely comfortable with. “I want to be there when the scientist is questioned.”

“Fine,” said Bloch.

Dr. Emmett Pope was sweating profusely, even with the air-conditioning in the debriefing room at full blast. Bloch had let him take a shower in the Zeta facilities, so he had gotten the blood and dirt from Novokoff’s attack off his body and he was wearing a shirt and pants that belonged to a member of the tac team. They fit him snugly, but rather than from muscle, as would be the case with their owner, it was from his soft pudge. He was still jumpy from the harrowing experience. Morgan sat down next to Bloch, who was across the table from Pope. Bloch adjusted a small digital video camera that was connected to a computer in the other room, where Shepard would be watching.

“Uh . . .” Pope said, motioning vaguely at the camera. He was wringing his hands, then tried to hold them still, but they were trembling. “Does that really need to be here? I’m not really supposed to ever record this stuff. They were pretty serious about that back at—”

“I can assure you that this video will never leave this facility,” said Bloch.

“Am I a prisoner here?” he asked sheepishly.

“No,” said Bloch. “We saved you, remember? We’re going to return you to your people in a few hours. Just as soon as we get a clear idea of just what exactly Novokoff was after.”

“Novokoff—that’s the man who led the invasion on the facility? Who killed everyone? The grey-haired one who was attacked by Abe?”

“Abe?” asked Morgan.

“Sorry. The chimp.”

“That’s him,” said Bloch. “What do you think he was after?”

“Oh, I know what he was after,” said Pope. “The Fury.”

“Come again?” said Morgan.

“A human-engineered fungus. Its official name is BFN04, but we all called it the Fury. We worked on some other projects before, but a few months ago we were diverted to working with this pathogen exclusively. And it’s a real bastard.”

“What does it do?” asked Morgan.

“It acts on both the limbic system, which regulates primal emotions, and the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for impulse control. When infected, a person becomes increasingly aggressive and violent.”

“How is that even possible?” asked Bloch. “I mean, how can a fungus change a person’s behavior?”

“There were some species that did so before,” said Pope. “Like the fungi of genus Cordyceps. They infect mostly insects, and change their behaviors in specific ways that help the fungus reproduce. For example, they make the insect walk to higher ground so that the fungus has the optimal conditions to spread its spores.”

“Thanks for the science lesson, but I’ve seen it in action, and I know what it does to chimps. But I’d like to know what happens to people. What exactly did you mean by ‘aggressive’?” Morgan asked. “How aggressive are we talking here?”

“Animals,” said Pope. “Worse. Machines bent on destruction. Completely without humanity.”

“The monkeys were infected with this fungus?”

“The apes were, yes.”

“It’s the same fungus as the one that affects people?”

“Yes, the same fungus can infect humans as other ape hosts.”

“Novokoff was mauled by one,” said Morgan. “Do you think he might have caught it?”

“It’s likely that transmission did occur,” said Pope. It’s not airborne, so it won’t be transmitted by sharing a room with an infected person. But with open wounds like that . . . I think it’s likely that the man has been infected.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask,” said Morgan, “but how do you know so much about how this fungus affects humans?”

“We didn’t intentionally infect anyone, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Pope. “Most of it we extrapolated from our animal models.”

“Most of it?” said Bloch, raising an eyebrow.

“One of our lab technicians, George—good lord, I only just realized I never knew his last name!—was attacked by an infected chimp, much like this Novokoff, and contracted the fungus. It . . . wasn’t pretty. The effect of the fungus is quick. We knew it was so in animals and we confirmed it in humans. In a few hours, he went from an introverted, gentle man to a beast. We had him restrained, and did our best to treat him. I won’t lie, we also collected what data we could. Tragic as it was, we weren’t going to squander the opportunity of testing the fungus’s effects on humans.”

“What happened to the infected technician?” asked Bloch.

“He died within a day from self-inflicted wounds.”

“Suicide?” asked Bloch.

“No,” said Pope. “Head trauma. From slamming his body into the door trying to get out of the containment room.”

There was a moment of silence, then Morgan broke in. “This could be good news. It might be Novokoff kills himself without us having to lift another finger.”

“Is there a cure?” asked Bloch.

“We developed a serum. The leader—Novokoff, you called him?—he took a sample of it when he left.”

“Will that prevent or cure the disease?” asked Bloch.

“No,” said Pope. “It will deter the effects of the infection. At least it did in the chimps. We developed it after George died. It should keep the disease from progressing as quickly as it usually does. We were in the process of studying the fungus. Our work was still unfinished.”

“So Novokoff will be suffering from partial effects of the disease?” asked Bloch. “What can we expect?”

“Diminished impulse control, risk-taking behavior, intermittent bouts of aggression. In addition to bodily pain and splitting headaches.”

“So he’ll be impulsive and aggressive,” said Bloch. “That can be a blessing or a curse. He’s likely to get sloppy, and attract attention to himself. But I can’t help fearing what he’ll do to catch our attention.”

“Is this thing infectious?” asked Morgan.

“Moderately,” said Pope. “Not airborne, I can say that for certain. Bodily fluids seem to be able to transmit it. And the fungus can survive outside the body, in dry media.”

“So if it were released in the general population . . .” began Morgan.

“I wouldn’t expect a global epidemic,” said Pope. “But if enough people were infected . . . it would be carnage. Blood running in the streets. It would spread enough to cause panic and kill a lot of people.”

“High impact, high visibility,” said Bloch. “A familiar style.”

“Do you think he’ll use it?” asked Pope. “Against the general population, I mean. Is he the kind of person that would really do such a thing?”

“That’s a definite yes,” said Morgan.

“Which brings me to the next order of business,” said Bloch. “We need to find Novokoff, and we need it done yesterday.”

“What about Novokoff’s goon, the one we took at the yacht?” asked Morgan.

“We got him talking, but he didn’t tell us anything that we can use. Looks like Novokoff was careful about the information he shared with the people that work for him. Pope, tell me exactly what he would need to deal with this fungus,” Bloch said.

“We’re assuming this guy has a lot of money behind him, right? He’s not some two-bit criminal, right?”

“We know that for a fact,” said Bloch. “After the operation he ran on the Montauk Project, we know that he knows precisely what he’s doing.”

“Well then,” said Pope. “He’s going to need a lab. You know, if he intends to produce the fungus.”

“What’s he going to need?”

“Well, some space to start with,” he said. “Airtight, with negative pressure capability. There are relatively few companies that can do stuff like that. Also a HEPA air filter—that’s High-Efficiency Particulate Air. Keeps stray funguses from getting out.”

“Can’t find those in your corner store,” said Shepard.

“What else?” asked Bloch.

“Lots of equipment. Centrifuge, PCR instruments, serology supplies . . .” He threw up his hands. “The list goes on.”

“Okay,” said Bloch. “I’m going to need a list of everything. Rare and expensive items at the top. Get it to Shepard as soon as you can. Anything else?”

“Well, he’d need at least one more thing. A team. One seriously qualified mycologist, plus a group of reasonably qualified assistants. You’re going to find a limited number of those in the world.”

“Shepard, I want a list,” said Bloch.

Lincoln Shepard, who had already started typing as Pope was talking, said, “Already working on it, boss. Putting together mailing lists and lists of conference attendees for working mycologists.”

“Good,” said Bloch. “Is that it, Pope?”

“That’s all I can think of right now.”

“Okay, get to work on that list,” she said. “One more thing: can the fungus be weaponized?”

“Well, sure,” he said. “The fungus can survive outside the body, but small infections don’t do much. You need to get a decent dose of the fungus to really develop the disease. Otherwise, your antibodies take care of the infection pretty quickly.”

“Give me the short version,” she said.

“The short version is yes, theoretically, but I’m not exactly sure how,” he said.

“All right,” said Bloch. “It sounds like we’ve got our work cut out for us. Shepard, how soon can you get results?”

“This isn’t going to be easy,” he said. “No guarantees. I’m just one guy.”

“Then maybe we should outsource this one,” she said.

CHAPTER 37

Andover, February 1

“Your hand should be higher on the grip,” Morgan told his daughter. “You’ll be able to control recoil better that way.”

Bloch had told Morgan to spend a few days with his family, and he took the opportunity to take Alex to the shooting range. He took her to a place half an hour from their house, a wooded area with a large pit excavated to be used as a firearms range. There were a handful of other shooters there with them, and gun reports rang out sharply, muffled by the ear protectors. Alex took her position and fired three shots.

“Not bad,” said Morgan.

“Not bad? I missed the target completely!”

“But your form is good. You just need to relax a bit more. You’re psyching yourself out. Try again. Take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then squeeze the trigger gently.”

She shot three more times. This time, she hit the target twice, though wide of the bull’s-eye.

“See?” he said. “You’re getting better already.”

“I guess. Now I need to reload.”

“Hold on,” said Morgan. “Lesson time. First thing you need to know is that a weapon can be your best friend or your worst enemy. You always handle it with respect and you never take it out of your holster unless you intend to use it. Remember this always: there’s no such thing as a warning shot. When you take out your weapon, it’s to put someone down. Do you understand?”

She nodded solemnly. “I understand.”

“Good. Now look. That guy’s about to shoot an automatic. I want you to listen for the shots and count how many bullets he spent.”

The man loosed a long string of bullets.

“So,” said Morgan. “How many was that?”

“How am I supposed to know?” asked Alex, bewildered.

“By listening,” said Morgan. “It helps to know the firing rate for most common automatic weapons. But let me tell you, that knowledge could save your life.”

Later, in the car, she asked him, “What’s it like to kill someone? I mean, in cold blood.”

“Is that something you plan on doing sometime soon?” he asked.

“It’s just a question.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Well let me tell you something. All this training you’re doing isn’t worth a thing, not a thing, if you’re not willing to shoot. You can’t hesitate, can’t stop yourself from doing what you need to do. You’re your own worst enemy in that situation. Because, nine times out of ten, the one who wins any fight is the one who shoots first.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” she said breezily.

“Don’t get cocky,” he said. “Talk is cheap. It’s different when there’s a person’s life in your crosshairs.”

“All right, Dad,” she said. “I’ll keep that in mind. Can we come again tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve got something I need to do down in the city. But maybe next week.”

They were quiet during the ride back to the house, and Morgan began to think that Alex was putting more time and energy into his way of life than he had realized. He was not entirely comfortable with her choice, but knew that the more he objected, the more she would dig in her heels. He wondered what Jenny would say when she found out what her sweet little girl was up to.

Morgan went back to Boston early the following morning and spent the better part of the day at a deli, pretending to read a newspaper and watching the doors of the building that housed the Zeta Division headquarters. And he waited.

He moved when he saw Bloch emerge. He couldn’t help smiling lightly at his luck. The day had turned out warmer than expected, and Bloch had worn a bright red blouse under her coat. She walked out holding her coat folded in her arms, and the red of her blouse was like a beacon to Morgan. He managed to keep his eye on her as she maneuvered around the people on the Common, toward Arlington Station. He hopped the train after her and followed her to North Station. There, he slinked after her, until he saw the man she was there to meet. Smith, the man who had recruited him.

The two talked, but both were well trained in avoiding lip-readers, subtly shielding their mouths and keeping their lips from giving away their words. He waited behind a pillar and took out what looked like a regular ballpoint pen, but was in fact a spy camera. The image projected lightly on his sunglasses. He zoomed in on Smith’s face and snapped a series of shots.

Not two minutes after they had met, Bloch and Smith nodded to each other and parted ways, Bloch walking back in his direction. Morgan hid behind the pillar so she would not see him, blending in with the people waiting for their trains. Now, he just had to wait a few minutes to be sure that she’d be gone, and—

“Hello, Cobra.”

Smith was facing him and looking into his eyes with humorless triumph. If being unflappable hadn’t been part of his training, Morgan might have jumped back in alarm. As it was, he managed to remain mostly unruffled.

“Mr. Smith,” he said in greeting.

“How very nice to see you again, Mr. Morgan. A real pleasure. What a surprise, seeing you here.”

Morgan had been caught. There was no use denying it anymore, or pretending that there was any other reason why he might have been there. “Tell me who’s behind Zeta Division,” he said.

“I am behind Zeta Division,” said Smith.

“And who’s behind you?”

Smith stared blankly in response.

“How many other divisions are there?”

“I have nothing to say to you, Mr. Morgan. You try my patience simply being here. You have the chance to make a graceful and repentant exit. I suggest you take it.”

Morgan wasn’t having it. “What is the Aegis Initiative?”

For a split second, Smith’s expression changed into something that Morgan might even have called surprise, but he immediately masked it with the slightest gloating smile.

“It’s only natural to be curious,” he said. “And, to be perfectly honest, we can’t expect, in this line of business, that our operatives not try to snoop.” He moved in closer so that Morgan could smell the menthol cigarettes on his breath. “So here’s the deal: you get one. This one. I walk away, and we never speak of this again. You shut down your line of inquiry completely, and accept that there are some things that you are simply not meant to know. Do we have an understanding, Mr. Morgan?”

There was nothing else to say, Morgan supposed. “Yeah, we have an understanding.”

“Good,” said Smith. “Go home, Morgan. Take some personal time. Think about what you want for your life. Like, for instance, if you wish to continue living.”

Morgan just fumed silently at the threat.

“Now,” continued Smith, “you will remain here for five minutes as I walk away. Do not attempt to follow me. It will get you nowhere, and I will know. There is no quicker way of getting on my bad side than following me. And you do not want to be on my bad side. Five minutes, on the clock. Good-bye, Mr. Morgan.”

And Morgan watched as Smith walked away, blending into the crowd, and out of sight.

CHAPTER 38

Turkish Countryside, February 10

Dr. Vogt was sweating profusely as he looked into the microscope at the brain tissue he had collected from an infected rat. They had mere days to do the work of months although Vogt had to confess that the armed men were a pretty strong incentive. He had managed to grow a colony under carefully controlled conditions. The colony had formed a puffball, which was a ball of spores that would eventually burst, releasing spores in every direction. He had kept the colonies in glove boxes, so that they never had any contact with the air they breathed.

He was startled out of his work by the Russian barging into the laboratory.

“What is happening, Herr Doktor?” he demanded. “What is taking so long?”

Vogt tried to avoid looking at the Russian’s bandages, which were crusted with dried blood. He looked at Julian, who was standing frozen and white in the corner, holding a clipboard in his bandaged hand.

“The spore collection is coming along well,” he said. “We will have the amount you requested in about a week.”

The Russian nodded. “What about the cure?”

“A cure is elusive,” said Vogt. “There is no known medicine that will kill the fungus that will not also seriously affect your own cells. Not for the infection in the brain. All you can do for now is to continue to take the serum.”

“It’s not working!” the Russian cried. “It’s spreading. I can feel it. Consuming me.”

“It is possible that I will not be able to stop it,” said Vogt quietly, bracing for the Russian’s reaction.

“Then what am I paying you for?” The words came as a subhuman growl, and the Russian’s face contorted with rage, looking like some kind of animal. Vogt backed away against the table. The Russian lunged, and he saw the fist coming at his face.

The Russian struck again and again. Vogt felt and heard the breaking of bone in his face. Each stroke made his ears ring and his mind flash white. With one of the impacts, he suddenly couldn’t see out of his left eye. Finally, the Russian seemed to tire, and stopped his attack.

Vogt slumped on the ground, his awareness fading. Before he lost consciousness, he heard the Russian say, “Pick him up. Get this done. We deploy the fungus within the week.”

CHAPTER 39

Washington, D.C., February 12

Chapman sat at the table of the situation room with the rest of the Emergency Investigative Task Force and a few other significant personages. Around him was a group of very important and very, very nervous men and women, sitting at the edge of their seats with their eyes firmly glued to an image on the big screen.

“The President has just authorized the operation,” said Schroeder. “The team is moving out.”

Waiting was agony. The SEAL team still had to arrive on site by helicopter, which meant fifteen minutes of nail-biting nothing. Still, everyone just watched the screen, where there were feeds from each of the helmet cameras of the team. Right now all they could see was the inside of a troop transport helicopter, all in green from the night vision.

It had been a week since Smith had whispered in his ear about the lab. The past seven days had been a mad scramble to coordinate the various intelligence agencies. There’d been a worldwide search of mycologists and labs. Finally, they’d caught a break: a qualified mycologist, a research superstar, had abruptly quit his job in a prestigious German institute and then disappeared. They traced his whereabouts to Turkey, where they had found that some very expensive laboratory equipment had been shipped a few months before. It took all of seven days before they had a location for the lab—an achievement to be proud of.

But right now, Chapman was only nervous. The operation could fail, and it could fail spectacularly at that. These were the best-trained men in the country, but even that was no guarantee of success—there was always the possibility of a tragic twist of fate, of a tiny misstep having dire consequences. Chapman wasn’t a religious man, but if he were, he’d be praying at that moment.

“Moving out,” said one of the SEALS on the monitor, and suddenly, the images began to change as the men left the helicopter. He ran along the dusty ground, in line with three SEALS ahead of him, toward a low building that looked fuzzy in the night vision. The lead SEAL planted a bomb on the door of the building. The door blasted open, and then they threw flash grenades inside. The brightness overwhelmed the night vision for a moment. They went inside, and there were no armed guards posted at the door.

The image followed them as they spread around the facility, finding empty room after empty room.

“Clear,” same the report.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“It’s empty,” said the team leader. “No one here.”

There was a palpable sense of dismay in the room upon hearing that.

“Documents have been burned,” he said. “Hard drives are fried. There’s a body. The scientist. And three others. This was the place, all right. But whatever happened here, they’re done.”

CHAPTER 40

Rio de Janeiro, February 14

Peter Conley opened his eyes to the first rays of the sun coming over Ipanema beach. He looked to the side and saw the gentle curve of Sonia’s back, a thin mist of sweat on her smooth tawny skin. The gentle rise and fall of her breathing told him that she was still asleep. He rolled out of bed and began stretching.

Sonia stirred on the bed, rubbing her eyes and mumbling sleepily in Portuguese, “What time is it?”

“Six or so,” he said, reaching for the sky with his hands.

“Oh,” she said, sitting up. “So early.” The sheet fell about her lap, exposing her ample breasts.

He touched his toes, then ran in place for ten seconds.

“Why don’t you come back to bed?” she said languidly.

“I’m not sleepy anymore.”

“Who said anything about sleep?”

He turned to see her mischievous smile, with all those pearly white teeth. He grinned back, and climbed onto the bed. He ran his hands over her skin. They kissed, deeply, fiercely. She grabbed his hair, he grabbed hers, and they fell on the bed together, bodies tangling.

An hour later, Conley stepped out of the shower, and she was already putting on a white low-cut sundress.

First, he called Chico, an agent with Brazilian Intelligence who was collaborating with him.

“Nothing new here, Cougar,” Chico told him. “I mean, we got a couple of new drug murders up in the favelas.” That was the proper term for the slums of Rio. “BOPE ran an operation today, might be you’ll want to take that up with them.” Short for Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, BOPE was the group primarily responsible for running crime suppression and antidrug operations in the favelas, and the few who had the guts and the guns to face the informal armies of the drug lords.

“All right, bud,” Conley said. “Just let me know if anything . . . out of the ordinary turns up, will you?”

“It’s the first thing I’ll do.”

Next, he tried to call up Captain Siqueira, from BOPE. He was told that the captain wasn’t coming in until a few hours later. There was nothing Conley could do, so he went for a run on the beach

It was a pleasant day, and people filled the calçadão, the broad boardwalk that ran along the beach. Young and old, rich and poor, shared this space, many shirtless, lean bodies basking in the sun. Conley jogged steadily, the sun hot on his shoulders and the salty wind blowing in his face, his sneakers hitting the stones that made up the boardwalk, which were black and white and arranged in a pattern that resembled waves. He made it all the way down the beach, and stopped for another stretch. As he pulled his foot against his thigh, a young man in shorts and a tank top came toward him, then pulled out a small knife.

“Perdeu, gringo,” he said, brandishing the blade.

Conley looked at him blankly. He was just a kid, definitely no older than eighteen, with tan skin and hair dyed an ugly golden-blond. He had a defiant look on his face, of triumphant self-satisfaction. Conley knew the type. One of those who grew up in the favelas a little too impressed with the money and power of the drug dealers, out either to prove himself or to make a little cash to buy some small luxury, like expensive sneakers or a videogame.

“Money,” the kid insisted impatiently. He pronounced it mo-neigh. “Money!”

Conley grabbed the wrist on the kid’s knife hand and twisted. The blade clattered on the ground. Then he kneed him in the abdomen and kicked his legs from below him. The kid fell to the ground, groaning in pain.

“Take this as a lesson, kid,” said Conley in Portuguese. “Turn your life around. Or the next guy could be the death of you.”

He got out of there, leaving the kid still in pain on the ground. There was a crowd forming around him already, and he didn’t want any extra attention.

He got quickly back to the apartment and showered again, putting on some fresh clothes. It was a twenty-minute drive to the BOPE headquarters. At the gate was a sign that said, VISITORS WELCOME, BUT MAKE NO SUDDEN MOVES, along with the familiar BOPE emblem: a skull crossed by two handguns with a knife stuck vertically through the bone.

The guard at the door waved him inside, and he drove in. He found parking, walked inside, and told reception whom he was there to meet. Soon enough, a square-faced, pug-nosed man in a black T-shirt and black military fatigues walked out.

“Capitão Siqueira,” said Conley, warmly.

“Our American friend,” he said. “Conley. What brings you here today?”

“I’m told you were running an operation today. I thought I’d come check in and see how it went.”

“Our boys just got back. We raided the house of a lieutenant from Paulinho AK’s outfit.”

“How did it go?”

“We captured the son of a bitch, and then another one to boot,” said Siqueira. “Popped a couple of their soldiers in the process.”

“Not bad,” said Conley.

“All in a day’s work for the skull,” he said laughing. Siqueira walked him to one of their interrogation rooms, where a thin, jittery man with curly brown hair who sported a big scar on his left cheek was sitting. He looked bruised and cut, with a fat lip and a black eye. There was blood on his shirt, still red and not quite dried.

“He looks a little roughed up,” said Conley.

“He resisted arrest,” said Siqueira. “We had no choice but to use force. And he ended up volunteering the location of the second one. Caught a big fish, just sitting on his ass at home watching soccer. In and out, no fuss, no problems. And we’ve got some valuable information from him. It looks like there’s a new coke supplier in town.”

“Interesting,” said Conley. “Where from?” Cocaine was a truly globalized business, and suppliers came from all over the world.

“He said the guy was alemão. German. But to these assholes, every European is German, so that doesn’t tell us jack shit. Anyway, apparently this gringo’s got a big shipment coming in, and made some interesting demands in how he wants it done. Wants it shipped to Miami, every gram of it. Nothing is supposed to get sold here, or even used by any member of the gang.”

“Is that unusual?” asked Conley.

“Only how insistent he was. I mean, usually, it’s all about the money with these guys. As long as they get paid, they’ll give the gang a sample, let them turn over the merchandise if they’re willing to pay. But this one wants it to go directly there, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.”

“Huh,” said Conley. “Got anything you can use to get to this guy?”

“Not yet,” said Siqueira. “But we’ll get him.”

“All right,” said Conley. “Keep me posted if there are any new developments.”

“Even if I don’t, somehow you always find out.”

Conley went back to his apartment, where he called up some more contacts, some in law enforcement, others on the criminal side. He took a break to watch a novela, one of the daily soap operas that he had gotten hooked on while in town. He had dinner, and it was well into the night when his phone rang.

“Hey, Cougar? It’s Chico. You said to call you if something happened. Well, something happened. I’m not sure what it is yet, but it’s strange. Real strange. It’s over near you. I’m going to give you an address. Just one second.”

Chico gave him the address, and Conley walked out the door. He walked back in his door two hours later. The first thing he did was to pick up the phone and dial.

“Bloch here.”

“Look, I don’t even know what the hell this is supposed to be about. But it seems weird enough that I felt I should call it in right away.”

“What is it?”

“A bunch of people—I guess the term is ‘ripped each other apart’—in a fancy apartment.”

“What do you mean, ripped each other apart?” Conley might have expected morbid curiosity, but Bloch’s tone was one of keen interest.

“Well, it’s pretty gruesome. At first, they thought it had been murder—revenge, serial killer, something like that. But if you take a look at the scene, a lot of the bodies have attack wounds. Mostly, they didn’t even use weapons, just their bare hands and teeth.”

“Were they mental patients? Were they under the influence of something . . . unusual?”

“Not as far as I could tell. They seemed like normal people, but I mean, who knows? I sure as hell don’t know what to make of it.”

“I might,” said Bloch. “Can you lay down a quarantine on the location?”

“Might be tough, but I think I can.”

“Don’t think. Do. Use whatever means necessary. Keep the scene secure. If you can, take charge and don’t let anyone in or out. Keep the media out of it, and the local police as much as possible.”

“What’s this all about?”

“You stay put, get inside that scene, and make sure that it doesn’t get contaminated and is changed as little as possible. Cobra will be there by morning.”

CHAPTER 41

Rio de Janeiro, February 15

Morgan arrived in Rio de Janeiro just past 9 A.M., and the first thing to hit him was the heat, thick and muggy, even inside the airport. He had come by chartered jet, since time, apparently, had been of the essence. Morgan had already been in bed when he got the call from Bloch. She hadn’t been too generous with the details. She’d told him that there was a bit of violence down in Rio, and that it might be somehow connected to Novokoff, but not much else. Because of his familiarity with both Conley, and the case, he’d been shipped off to Brazil.

He took a taxi, whose driver was definitely overcharging him. He drove like a maniac. Traffic was definitely not the worst he had seen—it was far, far better than Kabul, for one—but it was much worse than even Boston.

Morgan took the opportunity to get a look at the city. A good stretch of the city, specifically the areas closer to the sea, was perfectly flat. But farther inland, as well as at certain outcroppings near the water, the terrain was steeper, with tall hills that loomed large in the distance. On many of these hills grew favelas, organic and chaotic, even beautiful in their own strange way.

After about half an hour, the taxi came to a stop, and Morgan paid up and got out. He had asked the driver to drop him off a few blocks from his destination. It was a safety precaution, and kept the driver from knowing more than he ought to.

He was in the affluent neighborhood of Leblon. He had looked over a map in the taxi, and knew the turns he’d have to take to get where he wanted to go. He walked the sidewalks, which had remnants of sand in between the stones. The heat made him start sweating, but it wasn’t a long walk. Soon enough, he spotted Conley standing in front of a building, waiting for him.

Conley smiled as Morgan approached, and they embraced.

“It’s good to see you, my friend,” said Morgan.

“Likewise,” said Conley. “I never thought I’d see you come here.”

“What does Bloch have you doing down here?”

“I’ve been working the drug trade. It’s deeply entrenched in the city, embedded in the slum communities. The whole situation is delicate, and cracking down on it isn’t as simple as swinging a big stick. I’m working with a special local squad, the BOPE. They’re used to going into the drug-dealer-controlled favelas. They see as much action as any soldier. I should know. I’ve been out with them on operations before.”

“What do you think’s the point?” asked Morgan. “I mean, why is Zeta interested in the drug trade in Brazil?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” said Conley. “Of course, it’s relevant to global security. But why here specifically? No idea.”

“Hmm.”

“Speaking of,” said Conley, “have your investigations turned up anything new?

“Nothing much,” said Morgan. “Not even Fastia could help me. Except one thing. Ever heard of a thing called Aegis?”

“Aegis?” asked Conley. “Like the shield of the Greek goddess Athena?”

“Well, I guess that’s the idea,” said Morgan. “Something to do with protection. The name of—well, of something. Some kind of entity. But I can’t tell you what it means. Or what the organization does.”

“But I guess you’re going to want to find out,” said Conley.

“Like a dog with a bone,” Morgan said. “So, tell me. Why did I fly five thousand miles?”

“What I’ve got to show you is a crime scene. A local forensic team got to it earlier, but it’s mostly preserved. We’ve managed to keep the media buzzards at bay for now. We’ve had a little less luck with the real ones, though. Look, you’d better brace yourself. It’s not pretty up there.”

“Are you kidding me? I’ve seen my share of violence, same as you.”

“Not like this. Trust me, Dan, you are not ready for this.”

CHAPTER 42

Rio de Janeiro, February 15

This much Conley had right: it was the grisliest scene that Morgan had ever laid eyes on.

“Holy hell,” he said.

“Nothing holy about it, buddy.”

Morgan had put on a biohazard suit, helped by a Brazilian forensic investigator who had eyed him suspiciously but said nothing. Conley, in his own suit, led him to the stairs. Each apartment in the building took up one entire floor, so the investigators had set up camp in the apartment immediately below, in order not to disturb the crime scene. They climbed the stairs carefully in their big rubber boots, and then they walked in through the laundry room. That led into the kitchen, and Morgan saw the first of it.

The kitchen was spacious, with an island in the middle. On the island were two bodies. On top was a woman, whose hair had been mostly pulled loose from a bun and who was wearing a loose-fitting dress. Her face was mangled and broken, and a large chef’s knife had been pushed into her skull though her right eye. Still, for all the damage, she wore an expression of pure, unmitigated fury on her face. Under her was a man, arms still locked in the position of pushing her away, his face clawed—Morgan now noticed that the woman had blood and pieces of flesh on her fingernails—and a large chunk of his neck was torn out.

“Is this what you call—”

“Trust me,” said Conley. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

And then they moved into the living room, and Morgan knew exactly what Conley had meant.

They were in the penthouse, so the living room opened up into a spacious sunlit terrace. Just about everything about the decoration was white: the walls and ceilings, the carpets, the couches and armchairs, even the lamps. Which, of course, just made the blood all the more stark. And there was a lot of it. Morgan counted eleven bodies between the living room and the terrace. All of them were dressed in what had once been expensive semiformal clothing, but had in most cases been torn to shreds, and all of it had been dyed crimson.

The guests were mostly in their late thirties to mid-forties, Morgan noticed. Almost all the men lacked wedding rings. “This here was a party of playboy heirs and trophy wives,” Conley told him.

Outside on the terrace, there was a pool where a thin waterfall went right over the edge of the building, caught by a gutter about two feet down, producing the effect of a pool that ended in nothingness. The water had turned a deep crimson with blood. There was a body floating in it, facedown. One man was halfway through a door to the terrace, impaled on stalagmites of tempered glass. Blood had pooled on the floor all around him. Three more bodies lay on the ground, one of them on an upholstered chaise longue that had once been white. His eyes had been gouged out, and his face looked torn, as if it had been bitten or clawed. Another looked as if his trachea had been torn clean out.

It had been less than twenty-four hours since this had transpired. Bodies would decompose quickly in this heat, but the air-conditioning had been cranked up all the way, and it chilled Morgan through the thick plastic of his suit.

Morgan saw the remnants of cocaine on the glass of the coffee table.

“Peter!” he said. “Take a look at this.”

Conley walked over and examined the table. “Cocaine? Not exactly a surprise, in this kind of party.”

“No,” said Morgan. “Look. Apparently they all started suffering the effects at about the same time. It’s unlikely that one infected person would have spread the fungus so quickly. There has to be a vector, a means of delivery. And I think this is it.”

“Cocaine? To spread the fungus?”

“Think about it. Pope, back when we interviewed him, said that the fungus survives in dry media, like, say a powder. It’s already subject to traffic and smuggling. They can use the existing supply chains to get it into the U.S. Plus, it will have hordes of people infecting themselves as they get their rush.”

“Besides, it doesn’t make sense for this to be a targeted killing,” said Morgan. “These people were rich, but not important. Relative unknowns who only spend money and don’t make any. Who could care enough to use a stolen biological weapon to kill them? Unless . . .”

“Unless?”

“This wasn’t deliberate,” said Morgan. “Someone sold them this cocaine without knowing what it contained.”

Morgan saw a shiny metal object, half-obscured by a fallen body. He bent down to pick it up. It was a digital camera, lightly smudged with blood. He fumbled with the thick rubber gloves, but managed to turn the gadget on and open the saved pictures. There were a number of photographs that had plainly been taken in that same apartment, in the nighttime. Pictures of the party.

“Hey, Peter,” he said. “Help me out with this.”

Together, they identified each body with the picture. They had to use the clothing in a lot of cases, because the faces had been so badly scratched that they couldn’t make out any of the features.

“We’re missing this guy,” said Morgan, pointing at a picture of a man who looked to be in his late thirties, wearing a popped collar and making a party face.

“Are you sure?” asked Conley.

“He’s not here,” said Morgan. “Check for yourself.” Conley examined each of the corpses carefully. “You’re right,” he said. “No sign of him.” He turned to one of the Brazilian investigators and had a quick exchange. “He says there was no one else,” Conley told Morgan. “They combed the entire building for stragglers. If he left this apartment, it was before the carnage.”

“Well, we got our lead,” said Morgan.

They went back down to the lower floor. With difficulty, Morgan removed the tiny memory chip from the camera and set it apart to be sterilized. Then, dripping sweat, Morgan removed the biohazard suit. He got the clean chip and pulled out the tablet he’d brought with him, then inserted the chip.

“Now we only need to find this guy in a city of six million. Do they have any kind of image database? Drivers’ licenses, something like that?”

“I was actually thinking something a little lower tech.”

“What?” Morgan asked, pulling on his shirt.

“You’d be surprised at what doormen know about the people who live in and frequent their buildings.”

They went down to the lobby together. The doorman was being kept in quarantine in a rec room. He looked pale and on edge, but he seemed friendly enough when Conley approached him. Conley showed him the image of the missing guest on the tablet, and they had a quick exchange. Then Conley walked back to Morgan.

“I have a name. Rodrigo Bezerra. I’m calling it in. We should have an address in a few minutes.”

CHAPTER 43

Rio de Janeiro, February 15

Conley’s contacts gave them an address for a Rodrigo Martins Bezerra only twenty minutes away, and sent a picture to Conley’s cell phone. Bezerra was forty-three and tan with short dark hair and a smiling, untroubled face that made him look about ten years younger. He lived in an upscale apartment building, not quite as nice as the scene of the crime, but still one of considerable luxury.

Security was tight in the local buildings, especially the richer ones. There was a double gate on the outside, with a reinforced hut for the doorman. Through a two-way metal drawer, Conley slipped the man his police credentials, which he had acquired through his local contacts. They argued for a bit, and the guard let them in.

“He most likely knows English, but let me do the talking,” said Conley. “We’ll get more out of him if we’re a little more attentive to local cultural subtleties.”

“Are you saying I’m blunt?” asked Morgan with a grin.

They arrived at the floor and knocked on Rodrigo Bezerra’s door. Conley rang the doorbell, and Bezerra, wearing Bermuda shorts and a white shirt with three buttons undone, opened the door. He looked like he hadn’t been up very long.

“Hello,” said Conley cordially. “We’re conducting an investigation with the help of local police. We were wondering if we might ask you a few questions.”

“Hey, gringos!” he said jovially, masking a distinct nervousness underneath. “Come in! Come in! What can I help you with, my friends?”

“You were at a party yesterday,” said Conley. “Is that right?”

“I go to a lot of parties,” said Bezerra. He didn’t seem any more nervous than before. Morgan figured he couldn’t know what had happened.

“Well, they don’t all end like this,” said Conley.

“Oh, I don’t know how it ended,” said Bezerra. “I left early.”

“We know,” said Conley.

Bezerra looked puzzled. “What do you mean, you know?”

“Bezerra, I know you and the guests were using cocaine at the party.”

“What? Cocaine? I never—”

“Stop,” said Conley. “I don’t care. I didn’t come here to arrest you for drug possession. But I need to know: did you use any yesterday?”

“No, of course not, I—”

“Don’t lie to me,” said Conley. “If you did and we don’t get you to a doctor right now, you’re going to die. So again: did you use last night?”

“What? What are you saying?”

“Answer the question, Bezerra,” said Morgan.

“No. Not last night. I—I have a drug test coming up. At my job. Why? What happened at the party?”

“They’re all dead, Bezerra,” said Conley.

“Dead?”

“The cocaine was tainted. They were poisoned, everyone.”

“What? Poisoned?”

“We need your help,” said Morgan. “We need to know where they got those drugs!”

“I don’t know! I wasn’t with them when they got it!”

“And you don’t know where they go?”

“How should I know?”

“Listen, asshole, if you don’t tell us, more people will die,” said Morgan. “A lot more. I guarantee it.”

“Okay, okay! Look, I wasn’t with them, so I don’t know. But they have this guy. I don’t know his address. Just a name and a number.”

“All right,” said Conley. “What is it?”

They only got a first name, Robson, for the dealer, in addition to the phone number. The address that the number was registered to was bogus. Conley had his people run a trace on the phone instead. This led them to a nearby favela. Morgan was following Conley up the hill, through the favela. There was a strange beauty to the accumulated buildings, growing organically around, against, and on top of each other. The houses were made of exposed brick. Water reservoirs were equally exposed, and clotheslines hung between windows. Above, there were tangles of wires and a mess of television antennas.

Conley drove them in his local car, a Ford compact. By this time, the sun had long disappeared behind the hills that rose from the sea. People were slowly streaming up the hill, coming back from the day’s work, on foot, on bicycles, and in vans.

“This place is controlled by a gang led by a man named Paulinho AK. That’s AK as in AK-47. Apparently he’s partial to the Kalashnikov.”

Conley pulled over. The signal was coming hundreds of feet from the mass of houses to their right.

“From here, we walk,” said Conley. He led the way in between two houses. The alleyway was so narrow and the buildings on either side were so tall that it almost felt like a cave, dark but for lights that shone from windows and the occasional external light. The twilight still appeared overhead, nothing but a sliver that ran the length of the passageway. They came at last to a door, damaged and with peeling green paint and a lot of exposed brick underneath. The outside of the house was painted white and with the dirt of many years. Conley banged on the door.

“Robson?” he called out, pronouncing it Hobson.

The door opened, and there on the threshold stood a thin man, about thirty, in a threadbare T-shirt that looked like it had some campaign slogan on it. His eyes were red and puffy.

He spoke in a way that told Morgan that they were not exactly welcome there.

“He says he doesn’t sell here,” Conley told Morgan. “That we shouldn’t have looked for him here. And for us to get the hell out.”

They exchanged more words. The dealer seemed worried all of a sudden, and beckoned them in. “I told him they had been poisoned,” said Conley. “And that I’d tell his boss he pilfered the drugs if he didn’t play ball.”

Morgan nodded, and the man continued.

“Well, this is something,” Conley said. “He says his boss doesn’t know he sold that cocaine. Says he stole it off a new shipment.” The man continued talking. “He swears he only sold it to the people who held the party last night. Said they wanted to buy a lot. He only . . .” Conley frowned. “Uh-oh.”

“What?” said Morgan. “Uh-oh what?”

“He says they just finished snorting the last of it.”

They drew their guns almost simultaneously and aimed them at Robson.

“Stand back!” Morgan yelled. Robson just looked at them, scared and wide-eyed, like he didn’t know whether to run, stay put, or attack. Conley shouted something in Portuguese. They exchanged words, and then Robson slowly kneeled with his hands behind his head.

“I told him we don’t want to hurt him,” said Conley. “And that he might be sick.”

“Uh-huh,” said Morgan. “Hey, Conley, did I hear you correctly when you said that they just finished snorting all the cocaine?”

Right on cue, an animal scream came from the other room, and in ran a woman. She was squat, long-haired, and would have been pleasant looking, except for the look on her face. It was a look of wild rage, with flared nostrils and a mouth twisted into an inhuman grimace. She stared at them for a moment, panting like a rabid hyena, then lunged. Morgan and Conley both gunned her down with three bullets each.

Their attention next turned to Robson. He had stood up, and his face was now distorted, similar to hers.

Conley spoke as if he were talking him down. The man seemed fearful of the guns, and looked down in pain at the slain woman. This just seemed to enrage him further. Morgan saw him tense up, ready to leap at him, and loosed two more bullets from his gun, hitting the man twice in the chest. He collapsed, still alive, contorted on the ground. His chest heaved as he wheezed, and he stared at them with eyes full of hatred. Morgan shot him once more in the head to put him out of his misery.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Conley. “The whole neighborhood must have heard the shots.”

“Police?” asked Morgan.

“No,” said Conley. “The police don’t come up here. The drug lord is the law here. His soldiers are going to come, and if they find us here, we’re as good as dead.”

They ran out of the house and into the alleyway. Morgan dashed after Conley, trying to keep up as his partner wound through the narrow passageways. Conley emerged into the street ahead of Morgan and stopped dead in his tracks. Morgan soon came out into the street as well and saw why.

As they stood there, all around them were skinny young men in T-shirts and tank tops. They were all holding mismatched weapons, everything from handguns to assault rifles, all with tough-looking faces, chins up and eyes narrowed. The only thing the guns had in common was that they were all pointed at Morgan and Conley.

“Drop your gun!” Conley shouted to Morgan, letting his drop to his feet and raising his arms above his head. Morgan tossed his aside as well, and followed Conley’s lead by putting his hands up. Conley spoke a few words in Portuguese to them. One of the armed young men said something to the others, and others seemed to relax slightly. At least Morgan and Conley weren’t getting shot immediately.

Conley exchanged some words with the men in Portuguese, then spoke to Morgan.

“They’re soldados. Soldiers. Enforcers for the drug lord. Paulinho AK. He’s the boss around here.”

“Wonderful,” said Morgan. “What now?”

“The options were that they could kill us here and now, or we could go with them and have Paulinho deal with us.”

“Tell me they’re going with the second option,” said Morgan.

“That’s what it looks like.”

“So tell me. This Paulinho wouldn’t by any chance be the friendly, merciful type of drug lord, would he?”

CHAPTER 44

Rio de Janeiro, February 15

Morgan and Conley were escorted up the hill by the armed guards, who spoke sporadically as they walked. The people on the sidewalk retreated in fear as the soldiers passed, gawking at Morgan and Conley like they were watching a funeral procession. Morgan even saw a couple of them make the sign of the cross.

“How far is it?” asked Morgan, looking back and seeing how unexpectedly high up they were.

“The boss lives all the way up the hill,” said Conley.

“Cala a boca!” one of them spat.

“I’m guessing that means shut up,” Morgan whispered, then felt a sharp knock on the back of his head. He walked in silence after that.

First they went up a series of main roads, and finally a few dozen yards along one of those narrow alleyways. Then they came upon the house.

It was a strange oasis of luxury in such precarious surroundings. There were fancy tiles and a pool that didn’t look cheap, with a wooden deck built around it. There were scantily clad beauties all around, women of all shapes and skin colors who hung around to share in the wealth and power that radiated from the place. More alarming were the men, mostly young, and enough in number to form a small battalion. Each had at least one gun, and many had two—a handgun and a heavier weapon. Armed enough to form a battalion, too, but sloppy and untrained. Their guns were left unattended as they reclined or slouched, played with the girls, and snorted cocaine. A group of four was playing a loud game of cards in a corner. A small, organized special ops group could make short work of these guys.

“Valter!” yelled one of the men who were escorting them.

A dreadlocked white man looking a few showers short of filthy walked over to them. He had light brown skin and light greyish-blue eyes. He had a permanent snide look on his face, his chin turned up in defiance. He said something in Portuguese, and Conley answered.

“He doesn’t speak English,” said Conley. “Apparently he’s second in command to Paulinho AK.”

“Well, explain to him why we’re here. Maybe they’ll be willing to help us out. After all, it’s their own name they’d be tarnishing by selling tainted product.”

“I will,” said Conley. He spoke in Portuguese to Valter, received a response, then turned back to Morgan. “He says we’re going to be killed.”

“What the hell did you tell him?”

“I gave him the gist of our claim. He doesn’t seem to care.”

Six men with guns came over. Two of them had automatics, the rest had semis. They pulled Morgan and Conley away from the rest of the people, to be killed. They were getting looks from the people lounging around them. They knew what was about to happen. Morgan’s and Conley’s eyes met. If they were going down, they would go down fighting. If he could grab the automatic from the man behind him, he might at least take out—

“Valter!”

The voice came from a door on the far side of the pool. Morgan turned around to look. The man was black, with close-cropped black hair, muscular, with intelligent eyes. Strapped on his back was a Kalashnikov.

“Let me guess,” said Morgan.

“That’s right,” said Conley. “Paulinho AK.”

Paulinho yelled out some orders. The men who had their guns trained on Morgan and Conley stepped back, and Paulinho stepped forward.

“I speak English,” he said. His voice was heavily accented, his intonation off, but he was understandable. He had a quietly confident air about him, not as aggressive as Valter. It was clear why he was the boss. “You killed my mula.”

“We are sorry,” said Conley. “We had no choice.”

“No choice?” said Paulinho. “Maybe I have no choice. Maybe Valter is right. Maybe I kill you. What are you? FBI? Narcos?”

“No,” said Conley. “We are not here for you. We don’t care about trafficking. It’s not our business.”

“There’s something in your cocaine,” said Morgan. “It killed people. I don’t think this is how you like to do business.”

“Don’t tell me my business,” said Paulinho. But he added: “What do you mean?”

“The cocaine contains a deadly genetically engineered fungus. Cocaine that came from your man. Robson. It made people kill each other. And it affected Robson too. That’s why we had to kill him.”

This seemed to resonate with Paulinho. He started speaking Portuguese. Conley translated.

“He says some of his people have gone crazy and started attacking people. One guy apparently killed his wife by—actually, I don’t think you need to hear this one.”

Morgan was okay with that. “Who gave you this cocaine?” he asked. “Where did you get it?”

“The Russian. The . . . lobo.” Lobo. Wolf.

Conley pulled out his phone and showed him a photograph of Novokoff. Paulinho nodded.

“That is him. But his face, it was destroyed. Lots of blood. He almost kill one of my men. Punch and kick. Broke ribs and his arm and made him bleed.”

“And you didn’t do anything about it?” Morgan asked.

He shrugged. “Cost of business. But if what you say is true, I cannot allow this shipment to go through. Come. I have something to show you.”

They were led to a balcony, where they could see a sort of courtyard below. A man was chained up to a pole there, bleeding where the chain held him. Morgan soon saw why: in a fit, he started to struggle against the chain, putting the weight of his entire body behind the attempts.

“You need to get them all isolated,” said Morgan. “They’re infected. A disease.”

Paulinho shouted to someone behind him, and the man answered back. “I will do it,” he said. “I do not want any more like this in my favela.”

Valter came forward and began to argue with Paulinho. There seemed to be a lot of tension between the soldiers.

“He says they told the Russian that they’d get that delivered,” said Conley, translating. “Apparently there was a lot of money in it for them, and they’re not likely to see a dime if it doesn’t get to its destination. Valter isn’t happy about the situation, and from the looks of it, he’s not the only one.”

“Let us talk to the Russian,” said Conley. “Arrange a meeting with him. Help us capture him.”

“And what do I get?” asked Paulinho. “For betraying a business partner?”

“Money. Half of what the Russian promised you.”

“Half? Not all? Not double?”

“You release that cocaine, you kill half your clientele,” said Conley. “That’s not cost of business, that’s business suicide.”

“I will think of your proposition,” said Paulinho. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk.”

CHAPTER 45

Rio de Janeiro, February 16

“Let me say for the record that I think this is a terrible idea,” said Captain Siqueira, in English for Morgan’s sake. “These drug lords are scum. Trash. You are stupid to trust him.”

They had gotten their answer from Paulinho: he had promised to help. He’d called Novokoff in for a meeting. His soldiers were going to kill Novokoff’s men and hand over Novokoff himself. After discussing that, Conley had taken Morgan to the BOPE headquarters, where they had laid out the plan before the captain.

“It’s the only way,” said Conley. “We need this man. There’s a lot on the line.”

“Right, right,” said Siqueira. He was reclining in his chair, sucking on a cigarette. The acrid smoke pervaded the tiny office. “The biological weapon. I am impatient about getting it the hell out of my city as well.”

“So you’ll do it?” asked Morgan.

“I may do it,” said Siqueira. “But if I do, it will cost you.”

“If this is done, there will be an anonymous donation to BOPE of one hundred thousand dollars, and the guarantee that overseers will not ask questions about where it came from.”

“I think your pockets are a bit deeper than that, Cougar.”

“Two hundred,” he said.

“Three-fifty,” said Siqueira. “Plus fifty more for any of my men who are injured out there. A hundred for any that are killed.”

Conley looked at Morgan, then back at Siqueira. He was doing the whole dance of negotiating.

“We can make that deal with three hundred up front. No more.”

“I don’t think you are in position to negotiate,” said Siqueira. “You need this, and you have money.”

“I could go with mercenaries,” said Conley. He looked at Morgan, who nodded. “Private contractors. How much do you think they’ll cost me? A fraction.”

“Mercenaries? Pah! Each BOPE man is worth five of them.”

“Three hundred,” said Conley. “And that’s just because I like you so much. So. What’s it going to be?”

Captain Siqueira snorted, then smiled. “Okay, fine,” he said. “You win. Three hundred thousand. We will give you air support. Extract you two with Novokoff from the favela. I want Paulinho AK’s personal assurance that we are not going to draw any fire at all. He needs to know that if anything happens, BOPE declares war on his ass.”

“We’ll make sure to impress that on him,” said Conley.

Morgan and Conley waited in Conley’s car on a small side street until they got the call. Conley spoke a few words of Portuguese.

“That was Valter,” said Conley. “He gave us the go-ahead.”

They drove up the hill the familiar way. Paulinho’s soldiers watched them suspiciously as they passed.

“Just keep looking forward,” said Conley. “Don’t stare at any of them.”

In a few minutes, they reached Paulinho’s compound. They were waved inside, then frisked. They took Morgan’s Walther from him.

“You didn’t tell me they were going to take my goddamn gun away,” said Morgan.

“I didn’t know,” said Conley. “But I didn’t expect they’d let us bring it in.”

They were taken to the main room, where they had met Paulinho before. People there seemed to be tense. There was not a smile in the room.

“Where’s Novokoff?” asked Morgan.

“Where’s Paulinho?” asked Conley. And then Morgan noticed that the drug lord was nowhere to be seen.

“No Paulinho,” said Valter. “No more. Valter now.” He spoke in Portuguese at them.

“Conley, what the hell is going on?”

“Looks like there was a coup,” said Conley. “Valter says he’s in charge now. And the men with guns seem to agree with him.”

He continued to speak, and Conley translated. “He said the cocaine is going on the boat.”

“What about Novokoff?” asked Morgan.

“He says there’s no deal anymore.”

“Behind you,” said Conley, although he didn’t have to. Morgan sensed the others moving around him, and the women quietly slinking out of the room.

“On my mark,” said Conley.

Morgan saw a reflection in the sunglasses of a man in front of him that a guard with a submachine gun had maneuvered behind him.

“Go!”

Morgan spun around and knocked the gun from the hands of the guard behind him. He grabbed it and took the man as a human shield. Beside him, Conley had grabbed a Kalashnikov. Both of them sprayed bullets, sending everyone running for cover. Conley must have activated his comm, because he was shouting in Portuguese for the airlift.

“Let’s go!” he said.

They dashed out of Paulinho’s house, Morgan providing cover fire as they ran.

“We need to find higher ground!” cried Conley. “That’s where we’re going to rendezvous with the chopper!” Then he took out his walkie-talkie and screamed into it in Portuguese.

Morgan reached a vantage point where he caught a glimpse of the view. The favela sprawled endlessly below. This was not friendly territory. But in the distance, Morgan saw their salvation: a black chopper, approaching fast.

“Up there!”

There was a two-story house with clear airspace around it and a broad flat roof. Morgan shot out the lock to the front door, and they went in. A woman in the kitchen screamed, but they just went upstairs. There were stairs up to the roof, where a recreation area had been arranged, with a barbecue pit and plastic lawn chairs.

They shot around the corner at the bottom of the stairs.

The chopper set down and two BOPE agents stepped out, giving them cover fire. Morgan and Conley got on board. The two BOPE agents got back on, and they continued to shoot as they gained altitude. Soon, they were far above the fray, safely out of range of bullets. Still, for all the sweetness of being alive, Morgan still tasted the bitter flavor of defeat.

CHAPTER 46

Rio de Janeiro, February 16

“Well, I hope you two are very happy,” said Siqueira.

Morgan and Conley sat together in an interrogation room of the BOPE headquarters. It was a dingy room, furnished with cheap chairs and a small table. It was swelteringly hot. There was a fan mounted on the wall, but it was so dusty that Morgan wondered if it worked at all.

“How the hell were we supposed to know that the bastard Valter was going to take over?” asked Conley. “We had a deal with Paulinho. He was solid and good for it. We were as blindsided by this as you were.”

“I told you not to trust this trash,” said Siqueira. “But you did. You made a deal with the drug dealers. There is no deal with those assholes, I told you. I told you they were treacherous by nature. But you didn’t listen. You went in and you made a mess of everything. Now we do things our way.”

“What do you mean, you do things your way?”

“Come see,” said Siqueira. He led them out the interrogation room and into an adjoining one. There they found Valter, bruised and bleeding, taking a beating from two members of the squad.

“How did you get him?” asked Conley.

“We took advantage of the mess you created,” he said. “And we wanted to send a message to any upstarts thinking they can screw us. This was your failure. Now watch.”

Watch they did as Valter took punches and kicks and pinches that left large purple welts on his skin. It wasn’t long until Valter was singing. Morgan couldn’t understand what he was saying, but Conley translated for him.

“The cocaine’s on a ship,” Conley said. “Called the Argos. Left port one day ago for Miami.”

“Just the ship?” asked Morgan. “Can’t he tell us what container it was on?”

Siqueira translated the question for the interrogator, who in turn asked Valter. Valter responded.

“He says he doesn’t know,” said Conley.

“And what are you going to do about it?” Morgan asked Siqueira.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s not our problem anymore. We have other things to deal with here. Why don’t I show you two the door?”

“So we have no word on Novokoff?” said Bloch, speaking on a video call on Conley’s computer.

“No,” said Conley. “He was in the city, but after Valter double-crossed us, he was definitely tipped off. He’s probably out of the country by now.”

“So our main priority right now is the cocaine with the spores,” said Bloch. “We know the ship that it’s on. Can we find out which container it is?”

“We wouldn’t know where to begin,” said Conley. “Valter, the man Siqueira interrogated, couldn’t tell us. The ship is slated to arrive in Miami in less than a week. We can’t mount an investigation in that time frame.”

“Shepard,” said Bloch. “How about computer records? Is there any way to narrow down the ship’s contents electronically?”

“I’ve been looking into this,” he said. “It doesn’t look like detailed records of the containers are online. Customs declarations apparently take some time to be processed.”

“We can get those papers,” said Conley. “I have contacts here, and I could easily have access to them.”

“Wouldn’t help much, I think,” said Shepard. “That might work in a long investigation, but there’s not much I could do with those in just a few days.”

There were a few seconds of silence as each of them thought about more possible solutions.

“Well, we might as well consider the obvious,” said Bloch grimly. “With this fungus threatening to hit Miami and spreading beyond, it’s not too much to sacrifice some lives to prevent that. We can sink the ship. What do you say, Pope? Is it viable?”

“That’s not a good idea,” said Pope, the scientist, from off-screen. “You sink the ship, and the fungus is in the wild. It could be that everything would sink to the bottom of the ocean and we’d never see it again, but there’s no way to tell for sure. Spores can be extremely resilient. The results of that would simply be unpredictable. Who knows how long it might survive, and where it might wash up eventually? We could start an epidemic this way. It’s not a risk we should take, under any circumstances.”

“It’s better than an outbreak in a major American city,” said Bloch. “But we’ll take your opinion into consideration. It remains a measure of last resort, but only that. What else can we do?”

“Quarantine the ship,” said Conley. “Until we have further information. We can search the containers thoroughly, and be sure to get the right ones.”

“Sketchy plan at best,” said Bloch. “There are hundreds of millions of dollars in goods on any given cargo ship. That’s a lot of reasons not to want to keep it in port. Whatever clout our people have is going to be tested. And it’s a battle we’re likely to lose in a few days, without actually telling the government what’s in the cocaine.”

“Well, what if we do that?” asked Conley. “I meant, at this point, how much worse could we do?”

“It doesn’t seem like the worst option,” said Shepard. “We cut our losses and wash our hands of this. It might cause a panic, but that might be the least bad option here.”

“No,” said Bloch. “Absolutely not. The existence of this fungus needs to be kept a secret.”

“Are a few people’s sensitive secrets really worth endangering a major American city?” Morgan asked impatiently.

“Listen, Cobra,” said Bloch, “as secret as it has been kept thus far, we still had its existence leaked to Novokoff, and he managed to infiltrate a top-secret base to steal it. If this gets out, every major terrorist is going to want a piece of the action. And maybe one of them is going to get it. And that’s not even taking into consideration that people in our own government might just as easily want to have it and use it as a weapon. That is the choice that we need to make. I think it’s clear that we cannot allow this under any circumstance. The existence of this organism needs to be kept a secret, even if it means that some people have to die. Understood?”

“So what can we do?” asked Conley.

There was a prolonged silence. Then Morgan spoke up.

“I think I might have a way.”

CHAPTER 47

Miami, February 17

The foyer was all done in white and pink marble. There were large ornate mirrors on the walls, and fresh flowers in decorative vases. Morgan walked in confidently, but with due deference. He was about to ask a favor of a man who would not be happy to see him, and it would do him no good to act tough.

He heard the footsteps before seeing him: a large man, in a dark blue suit, his huge gut protruding from the jacket. “Hello, Sal.”

Salvatore Massaro was the head of a powerful crime family in Miami. He had a hand in all the dirty dealings in the city, from drugs to prostitution to illegal gambling. Back in his high school days, Morgan had gone to school with Sal’s niece, Gabriella, who was also Sal’s godchild. Morgan was friendly with her family, which was involved in organized crime in the Boston area. Shortly after high school graduation, Morgan had learned about a major drug bust in the town he’d grown up in, just outside of Boston, through a good friend who was a local police detective. Morgan had asked if he could go along for the ride and observe. Some warehouses had been raided, including one of Massaro’s located on the waterfront. During the raids, several of Massaro’s top people had been killed with several others arrested and a huge amount of narcotics had been confiscated. A crack house had also been raided and one of those detained was Gabriella. She’d been pretty strung out, but recognized Morgan and asked for his help. Dan had gotten his detective friend to agree to let Morgan take her to a clinic, where she would hopefully get clean. Dan had, and notified her family of her whereabouts. The family had made it clear to Morgan that they owed him a favor. Morgan had met Sal years earlier through Gabriella, and while they had never been exactly friends, there had been some degree of mutual respect between them. The police operation ended that relationship, and left Sal Massaro resentful of Morgan for not tipping him off somehow.

“Well, look who’s here,” Massaro said acidly. “What do you want?”

“And here I thought you’d be glad to see me,” said Morgan.

“We don’t like white hats, Dan. Not unless they’re on the payroll.”

“I’m not here to bust you, Sal, you know I’m not a cop. I’m here because I need your help.”

“Help?” he scoffed.

“There’s a shipment of cocaine that’s coming into port on a certain ship.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about any of that.”

“Please,” said Morgan. “You’re not letting anything come in and out of your city without your knowledge. Don’t play coy with me. I don’t want you arrested, Sal. Now hear me out. This stuff ’s been tainted as part of a terrorist plot. There’s a deadly fungus mixed in with this powder.”

“What, like anthrax or something?”

“Worse,” said Morgan.

“Worse?”

“If this thing gets out, I promise it’s going to be ugly. And if they trace it back to the cocaine, I can assure you that the DEA is the last thing you’ll have to worry about. Suddenly, ending the drug trade will be a matter of national security. And you know how civil rights and due process are the first to go out the door as soon as terrorism is mentioned.”

“That they are,” said Sal pensively.

“So you’ll help?” asked Morgan.

Sal laughed bitterly. “You come here with some half-baked story about some terrorist attack, and you expect me to leap off my feet to help you? To give up millions’ worth of pure blow? What the hell do you expect?”

“I expected a favor from someone who owes me,” said Morgan.

Sal looked dour, seething. “I never sold that junk. Meth. It made me sick to find out that Gabriella was sucked in by it. If it hadn’t been for you she would probably be a strung-out junkie or dead.”

“You can repay that debt today,” said Morgan. “In full.”

“All right.” He took out a pad and a pen and wrote four numbers down on a sheet of paper. “You’ll find the shipment in this container. It’s marked as being full of soybeans. Just get it out of there before the pickup crew arrives. They don’t play nice with people who steal their property.”

“Thank you, Sal.”

“My debt is repaid, Morgan. If I ever see you darkening my doorstep again, you’re a dead man. You hear me? Dead.”

Morgan looked him in the eyes and said, “I think we have an understanding, Sal.”

CHAPTER 48

Miami, February 22

The sun had not yet come up in Miami, and Morgan was huddled in the back of a van with Bishop and Spartan, with Diesel at the wheel. It was warm enough that they did not have to wear winter clothing—although nothing near the blazing heat in Rio—so the team wore light black gear. They’d brought only handguns and no heavier weapons.

Bishop checked his watch and said, “Let’s move out.” Morgan swung open the back door to the van, emerging into the darkness of Port Miami. They were in a parking lot surrounded by containers piled high, and in the distance, he could see the silhouette of a row of towering port cranes. He held the back door to the van as Spartan and Bishop came out, then closed it behind them. Diesel came around from the driver’s door, and they ran, single file, in between the sparse, dim lights to the edge of a pile of containers. The security guards had already been bribed, and would stay clear of the unloading area for the next half-hour.

The Argos had been unloaded in the late afternoon into the yard, and the containers still sat there, unopened. They walked down the rows until they found what they were looking for: the container that held the tainted cocaine. It was a rusting dark blue that looked black in the darkness.

Diesel used a heavy bolt-cutter to take care of the lock, and Spartan opened the door. It was packed floor to ceiling with sacks marked as being filled with soy. They pulled out the sacks, piling them outside the container. It took several minutes, but having burrowed through the container, they reached what they were looking for: heavy unmarked bags.

“Jesus, there must be thousands of pounds there,” said Spartan.

“All right,” said Spartan into the comm, “looks like our information checks out. Send the chopper.”

The chopper in question was an S-64 Skycrane, a transport helicopter that was built especially for heavy-lift jobs such as this. They kept watch for the five minutes until Morgan heard the sound of the approaching chopper. They waved it down by the container.

“Diesel, Spartan, like we practiced. Cobra, keep a lookout.” They began loading the sacks of cocaine into the chopper.

Everything was still in the port. The night was bright, and in the clouds Morgan saw searchlights from the nightclubs in the city. A whole other kind of brightness suddenly called his attention.

“Headlights,” said Morgan. “I’ve got headlights.”

“Just about done here,” said Diesel.

The source of the headlights turned a corner, and Morgan saw that it was a truck and a pickup. They seemed to be coming right at them. It could only be one thing.

The dealers had come to collect the cocaine.

“Everybody get in the chopper,” said Morgan.

“But there are only three seats,” said Spartan.

“I know. Get the hell in there.”

He took off, running between two rows of containers, and taking a right. The whir of the choppers’ blades grew louder as it took off. Morgan heard automatic fire, as the dealers shot at the departing helicopter. The sound covered his footsteps as he circled back between rows of containers until he emerged from behind them.

There were seven men in all, three of them holding Uzi submachine guns and the others wielding handguns. There was no way he could face them alone in the open, but all he had to do was draw their attention long enough for the chopper to escape.

Crouching at the corner of a container, he took careful aim with his Walther and fired three shots at one of the men with an Uzi. Two hit home, and he dropped to the ground. They heard him and turned to find the source of the shots. He quickly emptied his clip, hitting another man in the leg, and disappeared between the containers again. He switched the clip in his Walther as he ran, turning left, going down the length of three containers and turning left again.

Being alone, he had to rely on stealth and misdirection. By moving constantly, he could convince them that there was more than one enemy and lead them into confusion. He emerged from the rows of containers and fired three times, then ran out of sight again. It had been enough to allow the helicopter to escape, but the dealers were now swarming on him. He ran back into the maze of containers. He nearly bumped into one of the dealers and shot him at point blank. As he ran down the corridor, he heard gunfire behind him. He fired his two remaining bullets for cover and turned a corner. He was faced with a dead end. Morgan was trapped and out of ammo.

He heard footsteps of the man approaching, running toward him. He rounded the corner of the corridor, a man in Bermuda shorts and a red shirt with four buttons undone, with an Uzi in his hand.

“There you are,” he said with a cruel grin. He had raised the Uzi to shoot Morgan when three shots rang out, and the man staggered and fell forward. Another person emerged into the corridor. A woman with close-cropped blond hair, dressed in black.

“Spartan? You were supposed to be on that chopper!”

“You didn’t think I’d really abandon you, did you?”

“You were supposed to run away!” he said, grinning.

“Yeah, right,” she said.

“The others?” he asked.

“Gone. Come on, champ. Let’s get out of here before the rest of the family shows up.”

They ran through the maze, away from the chopper’s landing point, until they reached their van. Morgan got in the driver’s seat and Spartan in the passenger’s. He found the key, which Diesel had hidden in the visor on the driver’s side. He peeled out, leaving the port’s unloading docks behind as dawn’s first light appeared in the sky.

CHAPTER 49

Andover, February 23

Morgan arrived home late the next day to find Jenny alone in the house. It was a Saturday, and Alex was out having fun with friends. Jenny was sitting alone at the kitchen table, eating tuna salad and reading a decorating magazine, with a Sharpie sitting next to it. She always had it with her to circle pictures that inspired her.

“Hi, Dan,” she said dryly as he walked into the kitchen. “How was your trip? Do I even want to know?”

“I don’t think you do,” he said.

“I didn’t think so,” she said. “Look, I think . . .” She trailed off, looking into the middle distance thoughtfully.

“What is it, Jen?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Never mind. But I did have something to talk to you about. Did you know that Alex has been out shooting a gun?”

Morgan winced. “How did you find out?”

“She had it in her purse,” said Jenny. “I didn’t snoop. She left it out and I could see it. So you did know about it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I caught her in the act. She was sneaking off to the woods to practice on her own. I told her I’d teach her.”

“Why on earth would you do that?” asked Jenny. “Are you crazy?”

“She wanted to learn, and I didn’t see any harm in it,” said Morgan. He didn’t see a need to tell her about their daughter’s career plans.

“No harm in our teenage daughter going off and shooting a gun God knows where? What if she hurt someone? What if she hurt herself?”

“I taught her to be safe,” said Morgan. “She knows how to shoot without hurting herself and others. It’s something she likes and she’s good at. I learned to shoot a gun when I was years younger. She’s seventeen already. If she had been a boy, she’d have learned it as early as me.”

“And I still wouldn’t have liked it,” said Jenny. “I hope she’s not getting any ideas from you. I hope it all really is harmless fun. But I see her training martial arts and working out like crazy, and I’m afraid there’s something else going on. I’m afraid she’s learning to shoot because she thinks she’s going to use a gun someday.”

“Is that really a problem?” Morgan asked.

“Yes!” Jenny exclaimed. “She’s moving into your world, which is a dangerous world, and you’re letting her because you want a way that you can connect with your daughter.”

“I’m letting her because it’s what she wants!” he retorted. “If I don’t let her, she’s going to do it anyway! I might as well teach her to be as responsible as she can while I still have some kind of say over what she does.”

“Well,” said Jenny, pushing away from the table and leaving one third of her uneaten sandwich on the plate. “I hope you know what you’re doing, because I sure as hell don’t. But I guess it’s just one more person in my life who’s going to be keeping secrets from me.”

“Jen, please understand . . .”

“I do understand,” she said. “I understand why you do what you do, and I understand, I think, what Alex is doing here. What I don’t understand is why you need to lie so much to me. Good night, Dan.”

She walked out of the kitchen, upstairs to their bedroom.

Morgan went into Zeta the next morning. He took the elevator down from the garage and found Bloch waiting for him there as the doors opened.

“Welcome back, Morgan,” she said with a measure of warmth, which for her was uncommon. He almost thought he had seen a smile form on her lips. Almost.

“I really hope you weren’t standing there all morning waiting for me.”

“I knew you were coming,” she said. “I’d just like to congratulate you on your performance during this mission.”

“We didn’t get Novokoff,” he said. “I don’t think that’s cause for congratulations.”

“True,” she said. “But you did prevent a massive biological weapons strike in the United States. You saved a lot of lives, Morgan. And I want you to know that I recognize that.”

Morgan chuckled. “Does Diana Bloch have a heart after all?”

“Don’t push it,” she said. “All I can say is that I’m glad to have you on our team. You did good, Morgan. But he is still out there, and so are the people he worked for.”

“Do we have any developments on that?” he asked.

“We handed it over to U.S. government intelligence, which we managed to do without revealing the precise nature of the organism. They have better man power and resources to deal with this kind of search. We got lucky with the mycologist. But the kinds of paper trails we’re talking about takes a little more than we have here. For now, anyway.”

Morgan didn’t respond, but he filed away that for now in his head.

“Meanwhile, why don’t we take a little walk to Barrett’s workshop?” she said. “We’ve got a little something for you.”

Morgan followed her through the corridors of Zeta Division, then upstairs. Bloch put her hand on a panel, and the door opened to Eugenia Barrett’s workshop. The space itself was cavernous and brightly lit, with numerous worktables and electronic devices lying open with their innards exposed. There was a truck-sized door on the far end that Morgan knew opened up into the building’s garage. Heavy metal was blasting from speakers in the middle of the room, reverberating far and wide in the enormous room. In the middle was a something large. It was covered by a tarp, but the shape was unmistakable.

“You got me a car?” he asked.

“Hold on,” said Barrett. “Let me get the fanfare ready.”

“That’s unnecessary, Barrett,” said Bloch. “Just show it to him.”

Morgan’s eyes were already tracing the shape of the vehicle, making conjectures about what it was. Even covered up, he had a pretty good idea.

“Just wanted to add a little theatricality to the mix.”

Bloch shot her an impatient look.

“All right, all right.” With a flourish like a circus ringleader, Barrett pulled the tarp to reveal the vehicle underneath.

Morgan’s face lit up as he realized it was a black-on-black Ford Shelby GT 500 Cobra. Barrett then said, “We had it customized just for you. I haven’t gotten around to writing a user manual yet, but I can show you the ropes. It has a six-fifty HP supercharged V8 capable of more than two hundred miles per hour, with a six-speed manual transmission. It has nineteen-inch front and twenty-inch rear wheels, which will give you much better handling at high speeds.”

“Holy crap,” he said, like a kid on Christmas. “It’s . . . perfect.”

And Morgan knew perfection. He had loved muscle cars since his teenage years. He had approached his cover job as a classic car broker with the passion of the enthusiast. He could rattle off car stats from memory, and he had personally taken apart and put back together a few.

“I thought you might like it,” said Barrett. “It’s totally custom-made. Heavily armored with overlapping titanium alloy plates. Lightweight, and still it laughs in the face of assault weapons. In fact, anything not mounted on a tank is not going to pierce this bad boy. The tires are made of carbon nanotubes. Ridiculously strong. They can’t be shot out and won’t go flat.”

“Plus,” she said, “I’ve added a few personal touches. The exterior appears to be completely stock, but the headlights swing open and are equipped with heat-seeking missiles. The parking lights drop down and can fire lasers. Both of these have steering-wheel controls that will recognize your palm and thumb prints to prevent anyone else from activating these weapons. And then you have two nozzles hidden under the back bumper.”

“The old oil slick trick?” said Morgan.

“Oil slicks are for sissies,” she said. “This has an amazingly potent rubber solvent. A car behind you runs over it, and whichever tires touch this thing are going to become streaks on the asphalt. The inner tubes give out pretty much instantly, too.”

Morgan got into the car to get a feel for the leather seats and layout of the controls. Barrett continued her description, “Both front seats can be ejected. It is fitted with a state-of-the-art onboard computer system linked to several satellites and programmed for voice commands. Once we get you registered, it will respond to you, and you alone, and allow you to send audible text messages. It has detection radar and a GPS with 3-D mapping with a tracker so we’ll always be able to find you. It also has a remote or sixty-second-delayed self-destruct button, if you should ever need it.”

“Cobra,” said Barrett, “this car has the most advanced technology known to man, and if used correctly can be as deadly as any agent. Any questions?”

“Yeah,” he said. “How soon can I take this baby out on the road?”

Morgan pulled up to his driveway as twilight became night, and parked in the garage. The car was a magnificent machine. He had torn down the highway, getting a feel for its handling. He even tested out some of the more exotic features—at least the nondestructive ones. Eventually, he came home, but not because he ever wanted to stop driving.

As he was getting out of the car, Jenny opened the kitchen door and stood against the doorjamb, looking pleasantly at him.

“What’s that?” she asked. “New car?”

“Yeah, company perk,” Morgan said. “It’s called a Cobra, which I thought was appropriate. What do you think?”

“Very sexy,” she said. “Very you.”

“You’re very friendly,” said Morgan. “Frankly, I thought you’d be angry, after last night.”

“Let’s not talk about last night,” she said. “Just come here.”

She fell into his arms, and they kissed. They walked into the kitchen together as he pulled the door shut behind him. He put his hand on her back and pulled her close. They kissed again.

“I’ve missed you,” he said. He had. He had missed her warmth and her smell. Being close to her made him feel truly at home.

“I’ve missed you too,” she said, smiling between kisses. She pulled him close and ran her hand through her hair. “Alex is out.”

“Hmm,” he said. As they kissed, her breathing became heavier.

“Wait, wait,” she said, gently pushing him away. “Hold on. I thought I could leave this conversation aside for the night. Only for tonight. But I don’t think I can. I need to talk to you, Dan.”

Morgan pulled back, concerned. “What is it, Jen?”

“I can’t just—look, Dan. Two days ago. I had a crisis, a perfect storm of a day. Mom had a breast cancer scare, Alex went off again, and I ended up losing my temper and yelling at a client.”

“Oh God, Jen, is she—”

“She’s fine, thank God,” said Jenny. “It turned out to be a benign mass. But I could have used you here, Dan. I needed you. At least to be able to call you, to hear your voice. But you were gone, and I had no idea where you were.”

“Look, I really can’t tell you,” he said.

“It doesn’t even matter,” she said. “You weren’t here. You left for days without telling me where. Leaving me not knowing if you would ever come back.”

“Jenny—”

“No, Dan,” she said. “Don’t say anything. That happened, and then this Alex thing. I didn’t really know what to say about that. But look, the truth is, I just can’t fight anymore. I don’t like what you do. As a matter of fact, I hate it. But I’m tired, Dan. Fighting with you is exhausting. I can’t stand not being able to talk to you. I miss things just being okay and normal between us.”

“Me too,” said Morgan. “I want that more than anything in the world.”

“Not more than you want to be a black op,” said Jenny. “That much is clear. Though for the life of me I can’t imagine why.”

“Jenny . . .”

“So I don’t understand, and I can’t really say that I’m okay with it. You should know that I’m not. But . . .” She sighed. “I promised that I would love you and stay by your side, when we got married. In sickness and in health. And unfortunately, that includes your stupid decisions as well.”

“I suppose that’s really the best I could hope for,” he said, and then smiled warmly.

“I’ve missed you, Dan,” she said, relief flooding her voice. “I’ve missed you so much.” She pressed her small frame to him as they hugged. “I can’t stand not talking to you, not sleeping next to you. You’re already away too much. I can’t stand not being with you when you’re here on top of that.”

“I’ve missed you too,” he said, lost in the warmth and closeness of her body. Her hair was soft against his face. They held each other for a long time with closed eyes. Then she released him and smiled at him with misty eyes.

“So you got a new toy, huh?” she said, with just a trace of joy creeping into her voice. “When are you going to take me for a spin?”

CHAPTER 50

Andover, February 27

Alex Morgan got back from her run energized, with legs burning and breath ragged from the effort of the last sprint. The sun was low in the sky, and the wind was starting to pick up. Her sweat was beginning to turn icy cold and the cold was beginning to hurt her lungs, so she was back just in time. She saw as she was coming in that her father’s car was not in the garage.

“Mom, I’m home!” she said, closing the kitchen door behind her.

“Hi, honey!” her mother called out in response.

Alex went straight upstairs to her room to practice her self-defense drills in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom. She did her elbow strikes and palm strikes. She had started her shaolin kempo karate training at a dojo in Boston a little over a year ago. She’d known nothing about defending herself back then, but she had shot to the top of the students in her class. She had learned how to strike with her hands, elbows, and forearms, how to break her opponent’s balance, and how to take them down. She had also become proficient with knives, swords, and nunchakus.

She practiced removing the switchblade she had taken to fastening to her arm just below her wrist with an elastic headband and bringing it to an attack position in one fluid move. The she practiced the jabs and the slashes. When she had started training, she had cut her hand badly. She’d managed to hide it from her mother until it healed over—she didn’t want anyone to know about the knife. Now, she never cut herself anymore. In fact, it looked like she could really do some damage with the short blade.

Up until recently, her room had still been a little girl’s room. Her stuffed animals had occupied almost half the bed, which had a pink ornamented headboard, and she’d had a pink dresser to match, covered with old stickers that she had put up in her preteen years. It had undergone a drastic change since. There was nothing pink to be found at all. She had a plain adult bed with no headboard now, and a simple wooden dresser. On the walls she had posters of rock climbers and runners. On one wall she had her exercise routine, and a calendar where she had checked the days that she had performed it. The chain of checks was unbroken for three months now, and she was going strong. She had become obsessed with physical training, with the goal of being able to defend herself in any situation.

Once she was done, she took a shower, dressed, and made sure that the blade was secure and well hidden under the sleeve of her fleece shirt, then she went downstairs to the kitchen to get some water. She mixed cold with room-temperature water in a glass and downed it. As she put the glass down, she thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye.

“Mom?”

“Yeah, Alex?” her mother called out from her room upstairs.

“Nothing,” Alex replied. “Never mind.”

As she walked back up to her room, she thought she heard footsteps downstairs. She stopped dead in her tracks.

“Dad?” He was supposed to be in the city again, but it was always possible that he would come back early. “Is that you?”

When she reached the bottom of the stairwell, two men in black ski masks appeared in front of her. She screamed, but it was cut short when one of them grabbed her and put her in a chokehold from the rear. She could feel his breath in her ear, and was disgusted by the warmth of his body against hers.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the other man heading upstairs. Alex tried to elbow and kick the one holding her, but it was no use. In training, she could break anyone’s headlock—but this wasn’t training. There was no sensei to call off the strike here. Thinking quickly, she slipped the switchblade from under her sleeve, just like she had just practiced. Clutching it in her right hand, she thrust the knife backwards, into left side of the man’s neck. She felt his blood splattering on the side of her face and head. He roared and released her. He fell to the ground, grasping at his neck to stop the bleeding.

Without thinking, she went straight out the back door. She jumped over the fence and just kept on running, through the Harrisons’ backyard, from there out into the street, just running farther and farther away. She cried as she ran, choking with ragged breaths. The tears streamed down, her mind filled with the single purpose of getting as far away from the house as possible. Far, far away. She ran for minutes, but it felt like hours to her.

Her wits started to return to her, and the first thing that came to her mind was her mother. Her mother was in the house. Alex had panicked and left her mother there with the other masked man. The horror hit her all at once. She stopped running and, for a moment, just stood there, her fear on a perfect balance with her need to do something. Then she turned to run back to the house.

She ran as fast as she could, her already fatigued legs burning with the effort. The pain made her grit her teeth, push harder, go faster, each moment of ache a barb that, in her mind, was penance for having run away. As she ran, she imagined having done something different: that she had used one of her father’s guns and taken the other man out by herself. This fantasy sharpened the pain, because in reality what she had done was flee.

As she turned onto her street, she heard the police sirens in the distance, approaching. She got to her front door and took a deep breath. She was doing this. She had to, even if it meant that she would die or be taken.

She opened the door and ran inside. There was a pool of blood where she had taken out the man who had attacked her.

“Mom?” she called out. “Mom!”

She ran up to her parents’ bedroom. There was no one there. She checked her own bedroom and every other room in the house. There were signs of struggle, things on the floor, a broken mirror, but no one was in the house. The other man had left, and had taken her mother with him.

She was so frantic that it took her several minutes to calm down enough to call her father.

CHAPTER 51

Boston, February 27

Morgan raced home probably as fast as he’d ever driven before. He sped up I-93 North out of Boston, weaving through traffic. He took his exit, nearly tipping over as he made the curve, then ran every red light until he reached his house. He arrived to find Alex, by the headlights of his car, sitting on the lawn in the dark, sobbing uncontrollably.

“Dad,” she cried as he got out of the car. She ran to embrace him, and he took her in his arms. “Dad. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t save her. I just ran. Dad. I just ran out of there and I left her.”

“Calm down, Alex, honey.” He hugged her, and felt the skin of her face against his. “Honey, you’re freezing! Tell me what happened. Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m not hurt—”

“There’s blood on your face,” he said.

“It’s not mine,” she said, reflexively touching her face where he was looking. She sobbed. “Dad! They took Mom!”

“Who did?”

“Two men in masks,” she said. “They were in the house. I stabbed one and managed to get away, and then I ran and left her—” She broke down in tears. “Why did I run?”

“Did you check the house?” he asked. She nodded. He held her by the shoulders and stooped slightly so that his eyes were level with hers. “Alex. Alex. Listen to me. You did the right thing. You were faced with an impossible situation, and you ran. You did the right thing. You lived.”

She nodded weakly.

“Now,” he continued, “I’m going to find your mother. I need you to be strong for me and look after yourself while I do. Can you do that?” She nodded again, this time more calmly.

He took out his secure phone and dialed. It rang half a dozen times before he heard Lincoln Shepard’s voice on the other end. “Y’ello.”

“Shepard, it’s Cobra. I need your help.”

“Listen, I’m just running some test on a new thing I’m hacking together—”

“Right now,” said Morgan.

Shepard apparently took note of Morgan’s tone, because he asked, “What happened?”

“My wife’s been taken.”

“What?”

“Abducted. From my house. About half an hour, forty minutes ago. I’m going to need your help on this.”

“Can I get an address?”

Shit. There goes anonymity. “Yeah, sure, it’s—” He gave Shepard his home address and heard him typing it through the comm.

“I’ll scare up whatever surveillance I can get,” he said. “Any idea on the color, make and model of the vehicle?”

He turned to his daughter. “Did you happen to see what car they came in?”

“No.”

“That’s a negative,” he told Shepard.

“All right. I’ll look at traffic cameras in a pattern radiating from your location. Running some algorithms to narrow down the search.”

“All right,” said Morgan.

“Hold on,” said Shepard. “Bloch’s here.”

“Cobra,” came Diana Bloch’s voice. “What’s going on?”

He explained.

“Do you think it was Novokoff?” she asked.

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m diverting all our resources to this. I’m calling Bishop and tactical in. Meanwhile, I think it’s a good idea if you sit this one out.”

“Not a chance,” he said. “I’m coming back down to the city. Keep me posted.” He hung up, then looked at his daughter, who was shivering with her arms wrapped around herself.

“Alex,” he said. “I wish I could take care of you right now and take you somewhere safe, but every second counts right now. Listen carefully. I want you to take your mother’s car and go to the Mullinses’, over in Burlington. You remember where that is?”

She nodded weakly.

“Okay, good,” he said. “Here.” He took four hundred dollars from his wallet and put it in her hand. “If you need anything, don’t use your credit card. Don’t bring your phone. Call me from their house phone in two hours so I know you’re safe.”

“Wait, Dad!” she said. “Let me go with you. I can help!”

“You’re going to help me by being safe.”

“Dad, I need to do something!”

“I said go! Now, Alex!” He realized immediately that he’d spoken too gruffly, and softened his tone. “They already have your mother. I need to know that you’re safe while I get her back. Okay?” He hugged her, holding and comforting her for a minute. “Can you do that for me?”

“Yes,” she said weakly.

“Okay,” he said. He got back into the Shelby, which he had parked askew on the curb. He backed up, then peeled out, moving back along the dark suburban streets. His phone rang.

“Cobra, I got the vehicle,” said Shepard. “Black van, getting onto I-93 South thirty minutes ago.”

“Then that’s where I’m going,” said Morgan.

He was speeding back down to Boston when his phone rang.

“Hello, Daniel Morgan.” It was cold and cruel. The voice of a stone cold killer, a man with no heart. The voice of Nikolai Novokoff.

“You bastard,” he said.

“Come down to the city, Danny Boy,” said Novokoff. “And turn the radio to the local news. I’ve got a surprise for you. And I guarantee you’ll find out where your wife is very soon.”

CHAPTER 52

Boston, February 27

Morgan drove blindly down Storrow Drive, not knowing where to go. The urgency of finding Jenny, of rescuing her from the madman Novokoff, spurred him to accelerate, but it was, of course, useless. He had no idea where to go. The radio was tuned to a local station, but the anchor was giving a traffic update.

“Do you have anything for me yet, Shepard?” he asked, with his cell on speakerphone.

“I’ve tracked him down as far as getting to the city half an hour ago, but that’s it.”

“Keep looking!”

Morgan switched between radio stations until he came to another local news station.

“—we turn now to one of our citizen journalists, who just called in about something strange going on downtown. Sir, just what is happening?”

“Yeah,” said a man’s voice with a Southie accent, “there’s someone hanging from the crane here at that big construction site—”

“That would be the future Dwight Tower,” said the anchor.

“Oh no,” Morgan said to himself. “No.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Dwight. Anyway, they’re just hanging there, squirming. It’s a mob thing, if you ask me.”

“Thanks, sir. Well, there you have it, folks. We’ve got Steve going down to get a look at it himself—”

Morgan switched off the radio, then clutched, white-knuckled, at the wheel and sped off, grazing cars as he wove through the tight traffic, past the Common. He reached the block of the new skyscraper. A crowd was already forming, blocking his car’s access. He screeched to a halt and left the car, leaving the door open behind him.

Morgan ran down the street, barreling through the crowd, and looked up. By the skeleton of the rising skyscraper, already some thirty stories high, the huge yellow arm of the crane swung over the street. Hanging from its hook was a figure, tiny so far above the ground, contorting itself and swinging precariously. Her body was covered in what looked like a very heavy winter coat and pants. She was far enough above the street that all he could make out was her hair. The short, straight brown hair.

His phone rang and he put it to his ear. “Did you figure it out yet?” asked Novokoff’s mocking voice.

“Let her go,” he said. “Set her down right now, or I swear to you that I’ll—”

“You will do what? You have nothing to offer me and nothing to threaten me with. I am a dead man already. Courtesy of the savage beast you let loose on me. But I intend to go out in style, Mr. Morgan! And I intend to break you in the process.”

“What do you want?” Morgan asked. “What the hell do you want?”

“I want you to suffer.”

He pushed his way through the crowd, elbowing his way through where it was thickest. Four policemen had arrived at the scene, and were trying to keep an area clear underneath the crane. Morgan ran toward them.

“That’s my wife!” he said.

“We’ve got this under control, sir,” a policeman told him, holding up a hand to hold Morgan back. “We are going to get her down as soon as we can. We’re getting someone who can operate the crane to come down here right away.”

“Oh, could it be that easy?” Novokoff taunted on the phone.

“What did you do?” Morgan demanded.

Novokoff burst out laughing. “It’s too good. Just too good.”

“What did you do?”

“Look at your wife. Do you see the bombs I’ve strapped to her?”

Morgan tensed up, ready to dash to her.

“Don’t make for that crane, Morgan. I can detonate them remotely.”

Morgan stopped himself and stood still, not knowing what to do.

“Ah, but there’s more,” Novokoff continued. “You see, along with the bombs, I’ve strapped her with vials of the infectious agent.”

The world sank. “No . . .”

“Now, the bombs I have are set to go off in—oh, just over ten minutes now. If they blow, the fungus will rain on all the people below, and be set loose in this great city of Boston. But I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet!” he exclaimed with obscene joy. “I will give you a chance—one chance—to save your city. If you look to your right, you will see a trash can.” Morgan looked around at the confusion of faces in the crowd; then he looked up at the buildings around him. Novokoff had to be there somewhere. If he was half as devious as he was supposed to be, then Novokoff would also have a sniper trained on him. Morgan turned to face the building across the street from the construction site. It was a hotel, tall and boxy, with at least two hundred windows. It had the clearest line of sight to the street. If Morgan were a sniper, that’s where he’d be.

“I want you to walk to it and reach inside,” Novokoff continued.

Morgan did as he was told, and found something heavy and plastic inside. It had a handle of some kind. He pulled it out. It was a black detonator, with a red button on top protected by a clear plastic cover.

“What the hell is this?”

“The best part!” Novokoff said with glee.

“What did you do?” Morgan was a mess of rage and torment.

“You can save your city—by sacrificing her. Push that button and you activate the second set of bombs that I wrapped around her. Incendiary bombs. They will completely burn up her and the fungus.”

“I’m going to stop you,” Morgan said, gritting his teeth. “I’m going to save her, then I’m going to find you and kill you.”

“Oh, stop,” he said. “You’re taking all the fun out of my beautifully constructed moral dilemma. Agonize, Morgan. Live the decision.”

He wasn’t going to. That would mean to play on his terms. To make that choice would mean that Novokoff won. Except what if he couldn’t—he stopped himself from thinking it, and began to look around for ways to stop him. He hung up on Novokoff and put his communicator in his ear.

“Shepard! He’s got a bomb on Jenny. I need to you to get a jammer down here immediately. Think you can do that?”

“I’ll do what I can, Cobra,” he said.

“Don’t give me that bullshit, just do it! I need it here five minutes ago!”

“I’ve got Bishop here. He’s getting it ready as we speak.”

“Also, I think there’s a sniper on me. He’d be in the hotel across the street.”

“In the hotel? Care to narrow that down for me, Cobra?”

“I’ll try to get a visual,” said Morgan. “It’ll be hard from street level, though.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Shepard. “I got Spartan on her way to your location as well.”

“Okay, keep me posted.”

Morgan’s phone rang once more. It could only be one person.

“What the hell do you want?” he asked.

“Rude, rude, rude,” Novokoff said. “Hanging up on me like that.”

“Are you having fun with this?” said Morgan. He scanned the windows of the hotel across the street as he held the phone up to his ear. Novokoff had to be around here somewhere.

“Would you like to talk to your wife?” he asked.

Morgan didn’t answer. Of course he did. But he’d never admit that he wanted something from Novokoff. But the question had been rhetorical, and Morgan heard Jenny’s voice coming from the cell phone.

“Dan?”

“Yes, Jen, it’s me. Talk to me, Jen. Talk to me.”

“I’m scared, Dan, and I’m cold. He put bombs on me. He has me tied up, blindfolded, and hanging from somewhere that feels like it’s high above the ground.”

“I know,” he said. “I see you. Listen, Jenny, don’t be afraid. I’m going to get you out of this. I’m going to hang up now, but trust me.”

“I’m so scared, Dan. . . .”

“I’ll get you down! Everything’s going to be okay! I just need hang up now, okay? Remember, I love you, Jen.”

“I love you, too, Dan,” she said tearfully. “Tell Alex I love her. Tell her I love her more than anything.”

“Time is ticking, Morgan,” Novokoff cut in. “And you are making promises that you can’t keep. Oh, and look, the police are getting ready to go inside the building. We can’t have that.”

“What the hell am I going to do about that?” Morgan asked.

“You’re a resourceful man, Mr. Morgan. Keep them out or she dies.”

Novokoff hung up. Morgan looked at a group of policemen, who were opening the gate to the construction site with a wire cutter. He had to move fast. He hastily pocketed the detonator and stealthily drew his gun from its ankle holster. Then he scanned the crowd until he found a young woman, standing near the police cordon. She must have been no older than twenty-seven, tall and curly-haired. She was apparently alone there, dressed in an elegant black coat. Morgan jostled his way to her, keeping his gun low and out of sight. He brought his gun to her neck and pulled her aside quickly, so that he had her against the fence, with no policemen behind him, as she let out her first scream.

“Stand back!” Morgan yelled to the policemen, who had turned immediately and now had their guns on him. “Everyone, back!”

“Let her go!” said the nearest policeman, who was young. Morgan saw that his bravado was a cover for a deep nervousness. He would be the most dangerous one there.

“There’s nowhere to go, buddy,” said another policeman. He was older, with a face weathered by experience, a real, old-school Boston cop, clearly in charge, though Morgan couldn’t make out his rank.

At that moment, the alarm in the hotel across the street went off. Shepard, you genius. The hotel would be evacuated, and the only one left inside would be the sniper.

“Cobra, I’m guessing you’ve heard the alarm by now,” said Shepard. “I’m running an infrared satellite sweep on the location. Once enough people are out of their rooms, we should be able to locate the shooter.” Morgan couldn’t answer him, but at that moment, he could kiss the little geek.

“Back, all of you,” said Morgan, calmly as he edged to the gate to the construction site. “What’s your name?” he said quietly to his hostage.

“L-lisa,” she said, in a trembling voice.

“Listen, Lisa, you’re doing great,” he said, still moving slowly along the sidewalk. The four policemen backed to make way for him, and the crowd contracted back in fear, all the while being pushed tighter by the curious people in the back. One of the policemen had his radio out, calling for backup. Morgan had to handle this carefully. “Just move as I move and do everything I say, and everything’s going to be all right. Okay, Lisa?”

“Please let me go,” she said. Her voice was trembling, but she was composed. She had been a good choice.

“What the hell are you doing out there, Cobra?” asked Shepard, exasperated, into the comm.

“Drop the gun,” said the more experienced cop. “Nobody has to die here today.”

“Nobody will, if you just stay the hell back,” said Morgan. Lisa whimpered quietly.

“We need to get through that gate to help that woman up there,” said the cop.

“You can’t help her,” said Morgan. He had reached the gate into the construction site now.

“Why not?”

“He said she was his wife!” said the policeman who had blocked Morgan’s way earlier.

“Is that true?” said the older cop. “Did you do that to her? Is that why you don’t want us in there?”

“Cobra, what the hell is going on?” Shepard repeated.

“No,” said Morgan. “It’s because I’m the only one who can save her.” Then, quietly, he said, “How is that jammer coming along, Shepard?” He looked up at the windows of the buildings around him. Novokoff might be up there somewhere. Morgan knew he’d be watching. But once the jammer was in place, there’d be nothing he could do, and Morgan could run and save Jenny.

“Almost there,” he replied. “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”

“Who are you talking to?” asked the older policeman.

“You need to stay back,” said Morgan.

“You said you can save her,” said the policeman. “Let us help. Who are you talking to?”

“You can’t help,” said Morgan. He looked up at the crane again. Thirty stories. He’d have just over five minutes to get up there and defuse the bomb. “There’s nothing you can do, except stay out of my way.”

“The bomb squad is on its way,” said the policeman. “If that’s your wife up there, they can save her.”

Morgan saw a half-dozen more policemen making their way through the crowd. They’d have snipers on him within minutes.

“Okay, jammer’s in place,” said Shepard. Morgan noticed that one of the policemen was fiddling with his radio. Seemed like the jammer was working.

“You’re surrounded,” said the policeman. “Where are you going to go?”

Morgan pulled Lisa backwards into the construction site, looking back to locate the elevator.

“I’m going up,” he said.

He released Lisa and dashed behind a piled of bricks, as shots rang out behind him. Hidden from view, he fired two shots in the air. That should keep the cops busy. He ran around the corner of the building, out of sight of both the cops and the sniper, to find the construction hoist. It was a yellow elevator, with a cage at the bottom and a tower that stretched to the top of the construction. He opened the door to the cage and flipped the lever, but the power was off. It took him a split second to consider the stairs, and then looked at his watch. Three minutes to go. He’d never make it in time.

“Shepard, I need information on this elevator. It’s a Palson D-zero-five-five. Meanwhile, what’s the status on that sniper?”

“We’ve got two possible locations. Tactical is on their way.”

“Good. And that info on the elevator?”

“Got it here. What do you need?”

“I’ve got no power, and I need a way to make it go up. Fast.” He looked back, and fired two more shots into the air.

“Where’s the cage?”

“At the bottom with me.”

“Safety?”

“Not really my number one concern right now.”

“Okay,” said Shepard. “You’re going to want to release the brakes. This model only has emergency brakes on free fall, so once you do that, the counterweight should take you all the way up. There should be a lever next to the motor. Pull that first, all the way. That’ll allow the cables to move freely, independent of the motor.”

Morgan found it, outside the cage next to the tower structure, and pulled it. The steel cable tensed audibly. “Done.”

“All right. Now, get inside the cage. There’s another lever there, should be at ground level, along the edge.”

Morgan moved inside the cage. He saw the policemen rounding the corner carefully, guns drawn. He closed the door to the cage.

“Drop your weapon, and get on the ground!” one yelled.

“I need to get moving, Shepard!”

“You just have to pull the lever. Remember to keep hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times, and hold on to your—”

Morgan didn’t hear the rest. The elevator jerked so violently that the upward force kept Morgan pinned to the floor. Mere seconds went by until the counterweight hit the ground with a deafening clang that reverberated upwards along the structure of the hoist, shaking it so violently that Morgan barely noticed for a second or two that he felt no gravity. The cage stopped abruptly at the top of the tower. Morgan’s back collided painfully with the ceiling of the cage, and then he hit the floor again as the emergency brakes kicked in.

“—organ, Morgan, come in. Are you okay?”

There was no time to answer. He pulled open the doors to the cage. The brakes had arrested its ascent some ten feet above the highest floor. Well, no time to think about how much this is going to hurt. He pushed off the edge, and there was no ground beneath his feet.

He rolled as he fell on hard concrete. He immediately ran for cover behind a pillar. He heard a buzz as the sniper’s bullets flew past him, and two hit the concrete pillar, making dull thwips. He looked at his watch. Its face had shattered in the elevator, and his wrist was red and swollen, although he couldn’t feel any pain. He checked his pocket for the detonator. It seemed to be in one piece. He felt his other pocket for his knife. It might save his life again that day.

“Shepard, I need that sniper taken out now!” Two more shots whizzed by. “How much time do I have?”

“Just over two and a half minutes! Stay put, they’re almost at his room!”

Morgan counted the seconds off in his head, and they were the longest of his life. He looked at the ledge, and saw the crane that was hanging off the building. Jenny was there. She needed him.

He counted almost thirty agonizing seconds until Shepard’s voice came in his ear. “Okay, Cobra, you’re clear. They’ve taken out the sniper.”

Morgan took off running, and asked, “Novokoff?”

“Not there,” said Shepard. “They had some kind of camera setup for him, apparently.”

Goddamn it.

An icy wind blew behind Morgan as he ran across the unfinished floor. He reached the ledge and looked down. Jenny was hanging from the tower crane by its double steel cable, three floors down.

“Morgan, what are you going to do?”

“Morgan, this is Bloch. I’m sorry, but it’s time to think about detonating that vest. You can’t save her either way, but this way at least you can save—”

“Not going to happen,” he said. “Now shut up and let me do my job.”

He looked at the ground and did some quick mental math.

“Jenny!” he yelled into the wind.

“Dan?” came the response, sounding so far away.

“Jenny, I’m coming!”

He walked five steps backward, and took a deep breath. He took off his jacket and rolled it up as tight as he could. Goddamn it, he thought, I hate heights.

He ran at full tilt, clutching his jacket, and catapulted off the ledge. It was as if the world went silent for a split second. The rush of wind was nothing, and Morgan felt as tall as the skyscrapers around him. Then it came back, the rush of air in his ears, wind propelling him forward. He hit the twin cables hard, and swung the jacket around them. Holding tight to the thick fabric, he wrapped his thighs around one of the cables and rappelled down. The friction burned his skin even through the fabric. A few seconds later, his feet touched down on the hook. Jenny was bound and hanging under him.

“Jenny.”

“Dan? Is that really you?”

“I’m here, honey. It’s going to be okay.”

Now came the hard part. He looked down, the ground a vertiginous distance below. He could see more than a dozen policemen now, keeping the growing crowd back. Damn it, he thought. He had to get rid of the explosives somehow, and they weren’t going to make it any easier.

He braced for this next step. He wrapped his jacket around one of the steel cables, then around his left wrist, so that he had a firm grasp. One more deep breath, then he swung out, letting himself fall one body length. His left knee screamed in pain from the impact of his full weight. He bit his lip. This was no time for pain.

He looked at Jenny, almost face to face with her. Her eyes were covered with a mask, which he pulled off. He had a split second to register the mixture of surprise, terror and relief on her face before he kissed her for longer than he should have allowed.

“God, Dan,” she said, “I knew you’d come.”

“I’m here, honey,” he said, in a comforting tone. “It’s going to be okay.” Either that, or we die together.

The bomb could not have more than thirty seconds left on its timer. He examined Jenny closely now. She was strapped to a harness that held her to the hook above, but her hands were tied above her head as well. On top of that, she was wearing a vest with the explosives, just as Novokoff had described: the vials with a white powder, sticks of C4, and pouches of what he surmised was the incendiary. He looked at the detonator. Too complex. No time to defuse it, not with one hand, hanging one hundred feet off the ground.

He drew his knife and began to saw through the shoulders of her vest.

“Dan,” said Jenny. “If we die today, I just want you to know that I love you!”

“We’re not going to die today!” he yelled. He sawed through one shoulder, but it was slow, too slow. He began work on the other.

Once he had cut the shoulder halfway through, Morgan put the knife in his mouth, biting down tight, and took the detonator out of his pocket. He put it in Jenny’s hand, which was tied above her head, and opened the safety cover. He took the knife out of his mouth and said, “I’m want you to press that button when I say now. Got it?”

“Got it!”

He had to get this timing just right, or everyone on the ground would die, and possibly a lot more as well.

“Twenty seconds to go, Morgan!” cried Shepard.

“Shepard, I’m going to need you to disable the jammer when I say so.”

Morgan pulled at the straps around her waist, just enough so that they would fit around her hips, and, with his one free hand, pulled down the vest.

“Shep, do it!” He gave the vest one last tug. It slid down Jenny’s legs, and slipped free of her feet, falling into empty space. He gave it two seconds of free fall, then said, “Now, Jenny!”

There was an uprush of scalding hot air that burned Morgan’s eyes. Squinting, he saw the orange glow of the flames of the incendiary device all around him.

Morgan breathed a sigh of relief. “Is it over?” Jenny asked. In response, he held her close, putting his free arm around her waist, and kissed her passionately. As he did, he heard the tramping of the policemen’s boots, coming up the stairs to get them down and arrest him.

CHAPTER 53

Boston, February 27

“So let me get this straight—this guy took a civilian hostage, fired at our boys, caused a bomb to blow up in downtown Boston, and you still think he’s the good guy?”

Detective Rick Mooney looked at the suspect, this Daniel Morgan—not too tall, but strong as a bull, wide-shouldered and muscled—through the two-way mirror of the interrogation room, then stared at Detective Silvia Padilla, his partner of three years.

“I think there’s a chance he’s telling the truth,” said Padilla. “After all, he did manage to save his wife without anyone else getting hurt. She seemed totally convinced.”

“And still, she wouldn’t tell us anything useful about how she ended up there, with a suicide vest strapped on her,” said Mooney. “Something’s definitely rotten here.”

“Well, maybe he’ll talk, and shed some light on all this,” said Padilla, shrugging.

“All right, I’m going in,” said Mooney.

“Break a leg,” said Padilla.

“Thanks.” Mooney walked around and unlocked the door to the interrogation room. “Mr. Morgan, is that it?” he said as he entered. “Daniel Morgan?”

The man looked at him blankly, making no response.

“I get it,” said Mooney. “You’ve got nothing to say, right? You’re going to exercise your right to remain silent? Sure, that’s fine. You took a hostage, buddy. You shot at cops in the plain view of about three dozen witnesses. We don’t need you to talk in order to lock you up. But it can only help your case if we understand what you did.”

“I saved you all,” the man growled.

“Sure, sure,” said Mooney. “And your wife. It was very impressive, I’m told. And still. It seems you had a detonator the whole time. Say, how did you come by that exactly?”

Morgan didn’t respond to that, so he tried a different approach.

“Sure. All right. Listen. You got a lot of people’s attention out there. Now, we’re all very shaken by the stuff that’s been happening. All these terrorist attacks. Maybe you were trying to make a statement about that. Am I getting warmer?”

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Morgan said.

“Why don’t you tell me then?”

At that moment, the door to the interrogation room opened and in walked a professional-looking woman, fortyish, slim, brown haired with striking blue eyes, escorted by a hulk of a man, tall, black, and muscular, with a military bearing. “What the hell is this?” asked Mooney.

“Sarah Peters,” she said. “FBI. I’m here to take Daniel Morgan into custody.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” said Mooney.

“Do I look like I’m kidding?” She didn’t. In fact, she didn’t seem like the type who’d ever kid about anything.

“You can’t just cut me out of this investigation.”

“I already did,” said Peters. “This is no longer in your jurisdiction. This case and all the details pertaining to it are now classified. I’ll need his personal effects, if you please.”

“Listen, that’s not how things work,” Mooney said. “We don’t just turn over suspects to the FBI. We got a liaison with you feds. We do things through him.”

“You may,” she said. “I don’t care who he is and what authority he’s got. I’m leaving here with that prisoner, and I’m doing it now.”

Mooney sneered at her. “You’re not the type that hears no very often, are you?”

“Not from the likes of you, no. But call your liaison if you need him to spell it out for you. This goes over his head,” she said. “It’s frankly above his pay grade. And yours too. Now, are you going to comply, or do I have to get the commissioner down here?”

“Shit,” said Mooney, and he walked out of the interrogation room. “Hey, Padilla!” he called out. “Would you call up Foreman and find out what the hell’s going on?”

“You got it,” said Padilla.

“He’s just going to tell you what I’ve already explained,” said the woman.

“Well, I gotta check, don’t I? Can’t let you out of here with just your word on the matter.”

“Very well,” she said. “Check, and make it fast. He’s going to tell you to do as I say.”

“Looks like she’s right, Mooney,” Padilla called out from his desk. “Foreman said he doesn’t know what’s going on, but the order came from higher up. Prisoner’s supposed to be released into this fed’s custody.”

Mooney cursed silently. “Draw up the paperwork,” he told Padilla. Then he went to pick up the envelope containing the prisoner’s things and brought it back to the FBI agent. “I’m gonna find out what the hell this is all about.”

“I sincerely doubt that you will,” she said. “Come along, Mr. Morgan. We have a prisoner transport van waiting for you.”

CHAPTER 54

Boston, February 27

Morgan was escorted wordlessly by Diana Bloch and Bishop, posing as FBI agents, out into the yellow pool of the streetlights, where an actual light brown prisoner transport van was parked, with Diesel sitting at the wheel waiting for them. A gust of wind blew stray snowflakes in his face as he was led to the back of the van. They’d taken his coat, but he wasn’t cold, just numb. Bishop led him up into the van and made a show of chaining his wrists and ankles down. Bloch sat across from him in the back, and Bishop closed the two of them in. The wall between the back and the front seats was metal, and there were no openings to the outside, so that left only the interior fluorescent light to illuminate the inside. As soon as they heard the muffled sound of Bishop closing the passenger door up front, Bloch tossed Morgan the keys. He silently undid his cuffs as the van started moving, and let them fall to the floor.

“Took you all long enough,” he said, chuckling.

“You’re lucky we got you out at all, you bastard,” said Bishop over some kind of PA system. “After that stunt you pulled, I wouldn’t be surprised if they shipped you off to Gitmo. That was a hell of a thing you did back there.”

Bloch, who had sported her usual unyielding scowl, broke out in a smile. “You could have done a lot worse.”

“What about Jenny?” Morgan asked her.

“At home, and no worse for wear despite the shock,” said Bloch. “I made some calls and put a heavy protective detail on your house. They won’t be hitting you there again. We still haven’t located your daughter. . . .”

“She’s safe,” said Morgan. “I took care of it.”

“Good. I’ll let Shepard know. He’s looking into any potential new leads from this attack. If you could come to headquarters in the late morning, we can go over . . .”

“If it’s all right,” said Morgan, clutching his left arm, which was aching and bruised from the ordeal, “I’m going to go home.”

“Oh,” said Bloch. “Of course. Take the time that you need.”

“You do what you can,” said Morgan. “I just want to get home and be with my family.”

CHAPTER 55

Washington, D.C., March 8

“We’ve got a name,” said William Schroeder to an expectant situation room. “We’ve got a name for the bastard, and a picture to boot.”

A grainy surveillance photo appeared on the screen.

“We followed the lead of the lab in Turkey,” said Schroeder, giving a split-second thankful glance at Chapman. “The CIA traced all the heavy equipment—the HEPA filters and centrifuges and whatnot—through an elaborate paper trail. We traced the buyer to a Dutch dummy company. Ownership is broken up into a whole mess of holdings and investment groups, but we got the name on the checks. Edmund Charles. The name’s fake; there’s no record of this person existing. But the money is real, and he has to manage it somehow.”

A surveillance video played on the screen, showing a luxurious bank lobby with hardwood furniture and beautiful red carpets. A man walked in wearing a sharp navy-blue suit. He was tall, of average build, with a head of blond hair. He was greeted eagerly by a manager and escorted into a niche. The video froze.

“Now, this is an extremely slippery individual, so any and all efforts that we make at tracking him need to fly absolutely under the radar. This means we do nothing to tip our hand. We keep to electronic and remote surveillance as much as possible. Does everyone understand that?”

There was a murmur of assent.

“Good. Needless to say, gentlemen, none of this leaves this room.”

People stood up and began to scatter, slowly. Chapman walked up to Schroeder and pulled him aside.

“Listen, Bill, have you given any thought to the matter of what we’re going to do with him once we have him? I mean, that’s as big a question as how to get him, I think.”

“We’re going to do this the right way, Buck,” said Schroeder. “He’s going to be tried in a court of law.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Chapman. “You don’t think he’s working alone, do you?

“What do you suggest I do?” asked Schroeder pointedly.

“Whatever we have to,” said Chapman. “To get actionable information. To nail the people behind this and make sure they never do anything like this again.’

“He’ll be interrogated,” said Schroeder. “But there are lines I won’t cross.”

Chapman bit his lip.

“Are you afraid of taking this step, Mr. Chapman?”

Mr. Smith looked at him with some mixture of smug triumph and earnest sympathy. They were sitting across from each other in a mall food court. Ever the professional, Smith had a paper shopping bag at his feet and a plate of Chinese food in front of him that he pretended to eat. Chapman, meanwhile, was in no mood to pretend.

“It must be admitted, Mr. Chapman, that I do have some power over you,” Smith continued. “After all, you have no proof of my existence at all, and no idea of who I really am. Meanwhile, I have the evidence necessary to bury you, if I so wished.”

“Is that a threat?” said Chapman.

“It is just a fact, nothing more,” said Smith.

“I’m not scared of you,” said Chapman. “That’s the plain truth. I might have been before, but not anymore. I fully accept the consequences of my actions. That’s what makes me a man, Mr. Smith.”

“No doubt.”

“The name of the man you are looking for is Edmund Charles. He is expected to be in Boston tomorrow, and the FBI will be running an operation to capture him.”

Smith smiled smugly. “That is certainly valuable information. What made you want to share it with me?”

“It seems you know more about Novokoff and this crisis than we do. More importantly, even if we did capture Charles, I don’t think that we would have the . . . flexibility to do what we must. Our government is hampered by its own accountability to the public.” Accountability was something Chapman was proud of, normally one of his greatest ideals. Even deep as he was in the world of intelligence and spy craft, he believed that limits to executive power were all that stood against outright tyranny. But this crisis had worn him down. “I believe you have the resources to do what needs to be done.”

“Your country would call you a traitor for this.”

“As well they should,” said Chapman wryly. “I accept as much. But it’s for my country that I’m doing this.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “This goddamn crisis. It can’t continue. I can’t live like this. The world can’t live like this. I have a daughter. I don’t want this to be the world that she grows up in. I want her to be safe.”

“Then I am sure that you are doing right by her. Your assistance will not be forgotten, Mr. Chapman.”

“Find him, Mr. Smith. Find him and stop Novokoff before it’s too late. I’m putting everything in your hands. Don’t let me down.”

CHAPTER 56

Andover, March 9

It was midafternoon. Morgan’s study was darkening already, but he was in a thoughtful mood and didn’t get up to turn on the lights. It was a Saturday, over a week since Jenny had been taken, and he had not been back to Zeta headquarters since. Partly, it was that they had found nothing new to act on. Tracing Novokoff ’s calls had been a bust, along with surveillance footage and every other lead that they had followed. He had taken the opportunity to spend time with his wife and daughter and think about what had happened. Weeks ago, Jenny had fought with him for putting her in danger, and he had dismissed her concerns. But it was true. She was in danger, and so was his daughter. And his being a spy had put them there.

His phone rang, pulling him out of his thoughts. He picked up.

“Morgan, this is Bloch. We’ve got something. A lead on the man behind Novokoff.”

“I’ll be right in,” he said, and hung up, but didn’t leave his chair. A few moments later, Jenny walked in and turned on the light. She was wearing a stay-at-home sweater, her glasses on her face. An ugly black bruise still peeked from under the sleeves on both her wrists where she had been tied to the crane.

“Dan? I thought I heard your voice in here. Who was it?”

“Work,” he said. “They’re calling me in.” She seemed as though she was about to say something, but he spoke first. “Listen, Jenny, I have to see this one through. I’m in deep, and this guy needs to be caught. But after that, I’m out.”

“What do you mean, you’re out?” she said, sitting down with a concerned frown on her face.

“Out. Done. I won’t put you and Alex in danger anymore. I have to own up to this and do the right thing by you two.”

There was a moment when she just stared at him in silence. Then she said, “Bull crap.”

He looked up at her, startled. Jenny was usually unwaveringly proper.

“What?”

“You heard it. You need me to say it again? Okay, here you go: bull crap.” The word still sounded uncomfortable on her lips, but she said it with definite conviction.

“What’s bull crap, Jenny?”

“This. This talk about quitting. It’s absurd.”

“What are you talking about, Jenny? I thought this is what you wanted.”

“Look, Dan, it might be what I want. I might even have thought it was right. But I don’t anymore. They came into this house and took me away to be killed. These people deserve justice, and you’re the one who can bring it to them.

“But if it weren’t for me,” he said, looking down and trailing off. “If it weren’t for me, and what I do, you wouldn’t have been targeted.”

“If it hadn’t been you, then they would have attacked someone else. And that person probably would have died, because she wouldn’t have had you to protect her.”

“Jenny . . .”

“Don’t baby me, Dan. This is who you are, this is what you can give to the world. And it’s right for you to do it. So quit moping. It’s not like you.”

He smiled. God, that woman. “I guess I’d better go, then,” he said, standing up. Before he could take a single step, she approached him and kissed him deeply, and passionately.

“My hero,” she said. “Go to it. Oh, and Dan? Kick his ass.”

Morgan made it down to Zeta headquarters in fifteen minutes flat. He arrived to find Bloch at the war room table with Bishop, Shepard, and Barrett.

“Come join us,” said Bloch. “We were just having a strategy meeting, but I’ll fill you in. Our contacts tell us that the FBI has located the man who is behind the attacks. Shepard.” A surveillance image of a man appeared up on the screen. “He goes by Edmund Charles. The FBI has their sights on him. He has a safe deposit box at the Regency Trust here downtown, and he’s set up an appointment for tomorrow. They intend to run an operation and catch him in the bank. But we are going to snatch him right out of their jaws in the parking garage.”

“Uh, can I just come in with the obvious here?” said Barrett. “Why not let the FBI take care of it?”

“No,” said Morgan. “I’m not trusting a government agency with this. This guy sent Novokoff after my family. We are the ones who are going to take him.”

“The FBI has its rules and regulations,” said Bloch. “They won’t have the ability or will to use him to get to Novokoff. And that’s what we desperately need right now. The plan is that we catch him. We’ll have a van at the ready in the garage, and the tac team will make a quick extraction before he goes into the bank.”

“What if he gets away?” asked Morgan.

“He won’t,” said Bishop. “He won’t be expecting us. We know the location. We know exactly what to do. We’ll have live surveillance footage so we’ll see when he comes in. He won’t slip away.”

“I’d rather I was there, acting as insurance,” said Morgan. “In my car. If for some reason you don’t succeed, I’ll get him.”

“What makes you think you’ll be able to?” asked Bishop. “He got away last time.”

“I have better wheels this time around,” he said. “This time, he won’t be so lucky.”

CHAPTER 57

Boston, March 10

It was a clear and sunny day as Morgan waited on the street in his Shelby Cobra for Edmund Charles to arrive. He had a clear view of the exit to the garage of the building that housed the Regency Trust. It was half past seven in the morning when he saw the Audi TT Roadster approaching, and inside, Edmund Charles, still recognizable in a black wig. The car turned into the garage.

“Rabbit is in the hole,” Morgan said. “Repeat: rabbit is in the hole.” He turned the ignition key. He wasn’t going to get caught with his pants down.

“In position,” said Bishop.

There was a pause as Morgan listened for the others’ communication.

“He’s parked,” said Diesel. “Visual contact established.” A few seconds elapsed. “Why isn’t he coming out of the car?” asked Spartan.

“Something’s wrong,” said Bishop. “Look. He’s backing out. All units, move in! Don’t let him get away!”

“He’s gotten past me, moving toward the exit,” said Diesel.

“Cobra, heads up, he’s coming out!” said Spartan.

Morgan heard the rumble of the engine first, and then the Audi burst out of the entrance, breaking the barrier and squealing a tight curve at an exaggerated speed.

“Cobra,” said Spartan, “it’s all on you now. Go get ’im!”

He didn’t have to be told twice. Morgan floored the gas pedal and the Shelby took off. He heard police sirens behind him—no doubt the FBI, now having realized what had happened. Morgan pushed harder, closing in on Charles. The Shelby was bigger and heavier than the Audi, but Morgan had the more powerful engine.

That didn’t matter quite as much in the city, however. The Audi had him beat in maneuverability. Charles crisscrossed his way through the downtown streets, and Morgan followed behind him. It was clear that he was headed back to the highway, and there, Morgan would have the advantage.

“Cobra, what’s going on?” asked Bloch.

“I have him in my sights,” said Morgan. “Track me if you want to know where.”

“Good luck,” she said. “We’re counting on you.”

With Morgan hard on his tail, Charles wove through traffic and ran red lights. Morgan drifted along the curves, accelerating as much as he could in the short stretches of clear road in order to keep Charles within view. Finally, they reached the access to the highway. Charles squealed up the on-ramp, with Morgan hot on his tail.

They sped together along I-93, but there was no way that Morgan could even get close enough to use any of his car’s capabilities. At first, he planned on hooking onto the back of Charles’ car, but Charles was too evasive, and he couldn’t line up behind him properly. At the speed they were going, it was likely that one or both of them would soon get killed. Morgan didn’t give a rat’s ass about Charles’s life, except that he was their only connection to Novokoff.

So Morgan accelerated. Charles tried to force him off the road when they were alongside. In the stretch they were on, that would mean an eighty-yard drop to the streets below. But the weight of Morgan’s car had the advantage here. You’re not getting away this time, asshole, Morgan thought. This time, you’re mine.

They tore down the highway for mile after mile, neither car getting the advantage. Then, all of a sudden, Charles dodged him and braked the Audi, almost instantly falling behind Morgan. Morgan responded by turning the wheel and pulling the handbrake. The car screeched as he drifted a full one-eighty and kicked it into reverse, so that he faced the Audi head-on. Morgan had pulled the handbrake before Charles could react. Charles’s car slammed right into his. Morgan winced as the front of the hood crumpled. Then, with the push of a button on his dashboard, Morgan deployed the front hooks, and then the two cars were locked together. With a push of a second button he completely fried all the Audi’s electronics. Finally, he pushed the button on his dashboard, and an acid-green fluid squirted onto the road from behind the car. Going backwards, the Shelby hit the slick first. The back tires burst, then the front, and then Charles’s followed suit. Stuck together, the two cars skidded around, the now bare wheels raised sparks and a terrible grinding noise, until both came to a halt on the shoulder of the road.

His car stuck to the other bumper to bumper. Morgan glanced at Charles, who looked dizzy and confused, and smiled. “Looks like we’ve got a caged rabbit on our hands,” he said.

CHAPTER 58

Boston, March 10

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t I have certain rights in this kind of situation?” said Edmund Charles. Morgan hit him hard across the face.

They were at a designated safe house, a small isolated rural home just off the highway, with the broken hulls of cars in the yard. Edmund Charles was in a chair with his hands bound with duct tape. Morgan had commandeered a Ford Escort from a bystander, old enough not to have any kind of GPS tracking, and had gotten his prisoner out of there. Orders had come down from Bloch to take him to the safe house and keep him there until someone came. He was supposed to hold on to the man and do nothing, but Morgan was ignoring that part.

“I think you’re mistaking me for the government.” Morgan hit him across the face once more.

“I am well aware of who you work for, Mr. Morgan.”

Morgan narrowed his eyes. “Not many people who know that name have lived long enough for it to cross their lips too many times.”

“Oh, yes? And how much longer would you wager I have to live?” For a neutral face, Charles looked quite self-satisfied. “Eh, Mr. Morgan?” Each time he said the name, it was a taunt. It said that he knew, and that his family wasn’t safe.

“Not too long,” said Morgan, with satisfaction. “What’s your plan?”

“You mean what was the plan? You should know. You managed to stop the shipment before it was distributed.”

“Where’s Novokoff?”

“How should I know?” said Charles, with an exaggerated shrug.

“He works for you.”

“You know yourself that Novokoff has been . . . erratic, of late.”

“He was infected by the fungus you had him steal,” said Morgan.

“So I understand,” said the American. “Although, as it was told to me, that was your fault.”

Morgan backhanded him across the face. “I’m not kidding around here. Where’s Novokoff?”

“You know, the fungus seems to be affecting his brain quite a bit,” the man continued, oblivious to the question. “He has sunk to depths of cruelty that even I would not have imagined. I mean, what he tried to do to your poor sweet Jen—”

Morgan grabbed him by the throat and began to squeeze him hard enough that he might have rendered Charles unconscious. Then he released the hold. Charles showed no emotion.

“I’ll rip your head off if you say her name again.”

“Not an ineffective threat, I must say,” said Charles, spitting blood.

“Maybe you should be working harder to get on my good side.”

“What do you suppose is going to happen here?” asked Charles.

“You’re going to tell me what I want to know, or you will feel pain that you can’t imagine.”

The American laughed airily. “Sadly, no. Let me tell you how it will happen. You will not be allowed to keep me here. They are going to tell you that they have their own facilities, their own interrogators. They are going to take me away and you will never see me again. You may believe them when they tell you that they extracted whatever information it was possible to extract, and then disposed of me. But they will never prove it to you. They don’t care. And you will always have that twinge of doubt. What if they let me go?”

“Why the hell would they let you go?” asked Morgan.

“Because, Mr. Morgan. I have friends in places so high you cannot even see them.”

“Why don’t you tell me about them?” said Morgan.

“Oh please, you don’t actually expect me to—” Morgan punched him in the gut before he could finish. Edmund Charles retched.

“No,” said Morgan. “I mostly just wanted to distract you before I did that.”

“Very droll,” said Charles. “But I do have one more thing I have to offer you. An offer you may not want to reject.”

“What is it?” asked Morgan.

“I can tell you who you’re working for. I can tell you what Aegis is. I can see I caught your attention. You’ve been wondering about that, haven’t you, Morgan? Tell me, does it keep you up at night? I can take all that doubt away. Let me go, Morgan, and I’ll tell you what Aegis is.”

If anything did keep him up at night, it was this. Who was he working for? Whose interests was he serving? And here he was, someone willing to tell him. To give him all the answers.

“You don’t know anything.”

“No, Morgan. You don’t know anything. You play your little spy games as if you had some choice about the future, about what happened and how things turned out. Newsflash. You’re just a pawn. An expendable piece on the frontline. And behind your actions aren’t kings. They are players. And until you realize that, you’ll never be a player yourself. You’re going to continue to be played until someone decides that you’re a reasonable sacrifice to make to save a truly important piece.”

Morgan backhanded Charles across the face again.

“You’ve got nothing,” Morgan said. “Nothing but bullshit.”

Morgan heard a car pulling up outside, the wheels crunching the gravel and coming to a stop.

“Oh?” said Charles expectantly. “What’s that I hear? I do believe it’s the chariot that’s going to take me out of here.”

Morgan pulled out his gun and held it against Charles’s head, his hand trembling with rage. Charles laughed.

“What are you going to do, Cobra? Kill me?”

“It would certainly put an end to all this,” said Morgan.

“Will it now? Novokoff’s still out there.”

The front door opened with a long creak and Diana Bloch and Mr. Smith walked into the room.

“What exactly are you doing, Morgan?” demanded Bloch.

“Interrogating the prisoner,” he said.

“You were not to do anything before we arrived,” said Bloch.

“Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Morgan has been treating me very well,” Charles said blithely. “He’s been introducing me to the back of his hand. I can say that we’re pretty well acquainted by now.”

“Let’s get him back to Zeta,” said Bloch. “Morgan, would you escort him to the car?”

“Let me propose a deal first,” said Charles.

“Screw you,” said Morgan.

“It’s time sensitive and good for right now only!” said Charles. “I don’t doubt your . . . persuasiveness. I’m sure you’ll get me to say everything and more, eventually—ah, and that ‘and more’ is really the tricky part, isn’t it? But never mind, not here. Here, I offer you a one-time deal.”

“We’re listening,” said Bloch.

“I give you Novokoff and you let me go,” said Charles.

“He’s diseased,” said Bloch. “He’s going to die anyway.”

“I know what the fungus does,” said Charles. “It will make him more and more violent.”

“It’ll also kill him,” said Bloch.

“That it will,” said Charles. “But who knows how long the serum is going to keep him alive? And Novokoff is a man who can cause quite a bit of violence under normal circumstances. Imagine what he could do, filled with rage and knowing for a fact that he is going to die?”

Put like that, even in his own anger, it sent a chill down Morgan’s spine.

“Then there’s the matter of his disease. A bit contagious, isn’t it? Enough, probably, to kill, what, thirty, forty percent of the population of any place where it took hold?”

Bloch looked at Smith with an uncertain face. Smith offered no emotion.

“The clock’s ticking,” he said.

“You’re not actually thinking about this, are you?” Morgan asked.

“Why should we trust you?” Bloch asked Charles.

“Oh, you don’t think I actually want to cause a mass outbreak of this fungus, do you?”

“It’s what you tried before,” she said.

“That was for profit. And that whole plan is shot to hell now, isn’t it? There’s no use destabilizing the market if I don’t get to make money out of it. Trust me—” Morgan scoffed. “Trust me. I would personally much prefer if Novokoff were captured and killed. There is nothing that he could reveal that could do more harm than has already been done.”

“What do you want?” asked Smith.

“Simple,” he said. “My freedom.”

“I can guarantee your freedom if we find Novokoff,” said Smith.

“What good are guarantees? You are not the government. You have no constraints on your actions.

“What can I offer you, Mr. Charles?” asked Smith. “A helicopter? A plane?”

“There’s nothing you can offer me that you can’t arrange a trap for me,” said Charles. “Unless it happens now. I want the car you came in. I’ll give you his location as I drive away.”

“You must think we’re stupid,” said Morgan.

“I have no reason to hide his location from you. I want him killed. But it’s my only bargaining chip. That is my offer. And trust me, it expires very, very soon.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bloch.

“Novokoff will act soon. You know it and I know it. You need all the time you can get. Let me go, and you have your information now.”

Bloch looked at Smith, who nodded in assent.

“You can’t be serious,” Morgan said, exasperated.

“Quiet, Dan,” said Bloch. “This is not your decision to make. I think we have a deal, Mr. Charles.”

Morgan’s mind burned with anger. “He’s as responsible as Novokoff for what he did to my wife.”

“The question is, Cobra,” interjected Charles, “do you want to be responsible for the deaths of thousands?”

Bloch pulled Morgan aside. “Look, Morgan, I’m sorry, but there’s a greater good to consider here. You need to keep your feelings in check.”

“Mr. Charles, you may have my keys,” said Smith. “Morgan, would you cut him free?”

Morgan shot Smith the stink eye. Then he took out his knife and, resisting the urge to sink it into the man’s chest, cut the tape that was holding him to the chair.

“Thank you,” said Charles. “And I’ll thank everyone to leave their guns inside. I’m looking for a clean getaway here.”

Morgan put his Walther on the counter, and Bloch added a small snub-nosed revolver. Smith had nothing to place there. They all walked outside, and Smith gave his car keys to Charles. He got into Smith’s Mitsubishi, started the motor and then lowered the window.

“He’s in New York. He’s planning something for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Something big. That’s all I know. Now, please kill him for me.” He began to accelerate. “So long, and thanks—”

Before he could get the sentence out, Morgan had drawn his backup gun from its ankle holster, an Airweight nickel-plated Smith and Wesson two-inch revolver, and shot Charles clean through the head. The car accelerated blindly and crashed into a tree. Bloch and Smith just looked at him speechlessly. Morgan put away his gun and walked back into the house.

CHAPTER 59

Boston, March 10

“What the hell were you thinking, Morgan?” Bloch asked.

Bloch’s office, opaque glass, being chewed out. Nothing new for Morgan.

“Do you really believe we would simply have let him go?” asked Bloch. She was sitting close to him, facing him with those cold blue eyes of hers.

“Yes,” said Morgan. “I really do.”

“We had a helicopter standing by. We would have used satellite surveillance.”

“And still he would have gotten away, like he got away before.”

“Maybe,” Bloch admitted. “But even so. Do you think he was working alone? There’s something bigger behind this. And Edmund Charles was our only link to it. He was valuable even out of our grasp. Something lost can be found. But now he’s dead, and we have no way of tracing whoever is behind him.”

“Somehow, I can’t be too sorry to have killed a mass murderer,” said Morgan. “His bosses can wait. We’ll come for them too.”

“If we ever find out who they are,” said Bloch. “You’re not off the hook for this, Morgan. But luckily for you, this isn’t over yet. We still need to find Novokoff. It seems Shepard has something he wants to show us.” She hit the button on the intercom. “Shepard. War room.”

Morgan and Bloch walked down to the war room and sat at the table. Shepard waltzed in seconds later. “You’re gonna like this one,” he said.

“What is it?” asked Bloch.

“It’s a system I devised.” He clicked something in his hand, and the screen lit up. It showed a picture of a face. “It uses existing facial recognition software, which is itself pretty amazing.” Red dots appeared on different points of the face, including the cheekbones and the corners of the eyes and lips. “It uses a multipoint system to extrapolate a 3-D model of the—”

“Shepard,” said Bloch. “Focus.”

“Okay. So. This face recognition can be completely automated, and a powerful enough computer can analyze hundreds of faces per second. But the problem is, then, what are you going to analyze? Traffic and surveillance cameras are generally still too grainy, the definition isn’t good enough for the program. But.”

“But?” prodded Bloch.

He clicked the device again, and brought up a screen capture of a page from a popular social networking site. It showed the personal picture gallery of a person Morgan didn’t know. “What we have is photographs. An unprecedented volume of photographs being uploaded and shared on the Internet, out there where everyone—or at least, I—can see. But that, of course, isn’t enough. Every picture has embedded in it a good amount of metadata, including the date and time it was taken. More importantly for us, pictures taken on GPS-enabled phones can pinpoint the exact location where the photograph was taken as well.”

“So if a picture gets taken with Novokoff in the background—”

“We will know the location and time when it was taken, and so get an estimated position on him,” Shepard concluded.

“On a day like St. Patrick’s in New York, people are going to be taking pictures left and right. This might actually work.”

“And that,” said Shepard, “is why it pays to have a genius on your side.”

CHAPTER 60

New York City, March 17

It was a beautiful clear day in the Northeast and New York City was all clad in green. People caroused on the streets, bringing the city to life. The atmosphere was electric, joyous. The parade would go down Fifth Avenue from Forty-fourth street all the way to the Metropolitan Museum. Somewhere along that line, Nikolai Novokoff would strike.

Morgan, Bishop, Spartan, and Diesel had each been outfitted with a Kawasaki Ninja—sleek black sports bikes, which were far better than cars for navigating the crowds around the parade. He was carrying his usual Walther with a combat knife hidden on his ankle. In his pocket was an FBI badge that would fool any police officer and even turn up as legitimate in a computer search, courtesy of well-placed Zeta Division contacts. Morgan rode slowly down Seventh Avenue, eyes peeled, waiting for anything on Novokoff.

“How’s your system working, Shepard?” Morgan asked.

“The concept is sound,” said Shepard.

“Yeah, well, let’s just see how it performs in its first field test.”

Morgan wove smoothly and slowly through traffic and the jaywalkers who filled the streets. He stopped at a light. He watched the people crossing the street, many of them in green, some with painted faces. Young and old, men and women. So many people. So many for Novokoff to hide among, and so many he could kill.

“Got anything?” Spartan asked into the comm.

“No sign of any disturbance,” said Bishop.

“All clear,” said Diesel.

“Nothing here,” said Morgan.

“Or here,” said Spartan.

Spartan and Bishop were on the other side of Fifth Avenue, with Diesel on the same side as Morgan. There was no way to cross Fifth Avenue with the parade happening, so they had to make sure that all points along it on both sides were accessible.

“We got one!” Shepard exclaimed. “Holy shit, we got a hit!”

“Where?” demanded Morgan.

“Sixth Avenue,” he said. “Between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets.”

“That’s on my side,” said Morgan.

“All agents, converge on Sixth Avenue, between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth,” said Bishop. “Diesel, I want you on the corner of Forty-ninth and Sixth, and Cobra, on the corner of Fiftieth and Sixth. We are not going to let him slip through our fingers.”

“He’s wearing a long black overcoat,” said Shepard. “Looks like he’s got brown hair now, and his forehead is bandaged up, but that’s him all right.”

Morgan got to the corner of Fiftieth and Sixth and scanned the crowd. This was going to be hard. There were plenty of people in normal street clothes, and his Novokoff’s were about as common as you could get for New York City. He watched for the faces.

“I don’t see him,” he said.

“That’s a negative here too,” said Diesel.

“Doesn’t matter—I’ve got another hit,” said Shepard. “He’s on Rockefeller Plaza, moving towards the parade.”

“On it,” Morgan said. He had to ditch the bike—traffic was barred from getting any closer to the parade, and he wouldn’t be able to move very far anyway. He parked it illegally and ran off into the crowd before a police officer noticed.

“Okay,” said Morgan, “I see him.”

“Don’t let him see you,” said Bishop.

“Not planning on it,” said Morgan.

Morgan made his way through the crowd, going as fast as he could without knocking anybody down or drawing too much attention to himself. He drew near, and spotted Novokoff facing the parade among a throng of people. No possibility of a clean shot here.

Novokoff reached into his coat, and drew something out. Morgan saw that it was a detonator, a red button with a clear plastic cover with a thick black antenna on a black handle. There would be no time to think on this one. He had to take action.

Morgan drew his gun and fired two shots up into the air.

Immediately people around him screamed and began to back away in every direction, parents shielding their children and everyone moving as fast as possible away from him—and Novokoff. The Russian had only time to turn around and look at him wide-eyed before Morgan, now with a clear view and civilians out of the way, fired off a shot.

Novokoff’s hand gushed red, and the detonator went tumbling to the ground. Morgan aimed again, this time at Novokoff ’s leg. His knee buckled, and he fell kneeling to the ground. He tried to get up, yelled out in pain, and stumbled back down.

Several police officers had drawn their weapons and were ready to fire. Morgan drew his fake FBI badge and held it up, holding his gun by the muzzle and up where they all could see. “Counterterrorism!” he yelled. “This man has a bomb. I need you to form a perimeter around this area. Get people away from here.”

“You got it, sir,” said the policeman, and turned his attention to the crowd.

Morgan looked back at Novokoff. He was squirming in pain, trying to reach for the detonator, which was a few feet out of reach.

“You’d better stop,” said Morgan. “I can hit a fly in the air from this distance. Your brain will be splattered all over the pavement before you come within a foot of that thing.”

Novokoff turned to him and gave him a wide bloody smile. “Will that make you happy? To get your revenge? To see me destroyed?”

“I’m here to stop you from causing an epidemic in this city,” he said.

“Then I’m afraid you are out of luck,” he said, wincing in pain. This bomb will go off, Agent Cobra. I anticipated this possibility, and put the bomb on a timer. It will not be long now.”

Diesel came forward and crouched down over Novokoff while Morgan held his gun to his head. He pulled Novokoff’s jacket open carefully. Bombs were strapped to his torso in a tangle of wires. On the outside were at least five sizeable vials of a white powder—the fungus. Any detonation would send it flying into the air in every direction, and there was no telling how many people would be infected.

“Move and I can make this a lot more painful for you,” Morgan said. Then, to Diesel, “What can you do?”

“Not much,” he said. “There are a lot of decoys. Lots of ways that I can send us sky-high, including taking it off of him.”

“Shepard,” said Diesel. “I need something to contain him.”

“There’s not enough time,” said Novokoff. “Two minutes and you are all dead.”

“He’s right,” said Shepard. “I’ll route the bomb squad to you guys, but there isn’t enough time.”

“There has to be some way,” said Morgan.

There was only silence as Novokoff laughed gleefully. “You have me, and there is nothing you can do now.”

“We use the satellite,” said Shepard, voice rising with the epiphany.

“What?” said Morgan. “What satellite?”

“The Chinese defense satellite. We take control and aim the laser toward Earth. It can hit a ballistic missile going at ten thousand miles per hour. No reason we can’t target Novokoff on the surface. Anything in its path will burn at temperatures of a few thousand degrees. Even better, it won’t set off any plastic explosives.”

“No,” said Bloch. “Absolutely not, no!”

“We might not have any choice,” said Morgan.

“It’ll cause an international incident,” said Bloch. “It could expose Zeta Division. It would put us right in the sights of the Chinese.”

“And if we don’t, Novokoff might set loose an infection in New York City that could kill millions,” said Morgan. “You don’t have a choice, Bloch. You have to use it.”

“It’s too late, Cobra,” Novokoff screamed. “It doesn’t matter if you kill me! I’m already dead! But you won’t stop this bomb from going off! I’m taking all these people with me! I’m taking this whole goddamn city with me!”

“Shepard, we need you to do it now!”

From space, the hijacked Chinese satellite beamed down its laser.

The laser itself was completely invisible, so there was nothing to see, but Morgan could feel the heat that was emanating from that spot. It was like sitting in front of a fireplace at first, but in a few seconds it grew to the intensity of a blast furnace. People around yelled and gasped, and there was a scramble to get away from the spot that was suddenly and inexplicably hot.

But most shocking was Novokoff himself. Morgan wanted to look away, but couldn’t. Wild-eyed, the Russian had noticed that something was wrong, but by then the heat had become too intense, and it was too late for him. His hair went first, a bout of flame breaking out spontaneously from it. He began to scream at that point, and slap at his head to put the fire out. It was useless. The hair shriveled up and blackened instantly, sticking to his head. Some of it stuck to his hand, and the scalp came off with it.

Then Novokoff’s entire body went up in a torrent of flames, orange and thick as if it were some hellish fluid, turning into thick black smoke some ten feet above Novokoff’s head. The screams were drowned out by the sound of the flames, and then stopped altogether. All around him, the asphalt turned to pitch, a thick, viscous black substance. The fire slowly died as it ran out of material to consume, and slowly, the heat subsided.

When it was over, all that was left were his bones charred black, along with a few hunks of melted metal, half-embedded in hardening asphalt.

CHAPTER 61

Washington, D.C., March 18

That was the afternoon when the call came.

Buck Chapman sat in his living room, watching baby Ella as she slept soundly. Rose was out, and he thanked God for that. He didn’t think he could face her. Not now. He was sick to his stomach every time he remembered what he’d done. He wasn’t sorry. He had been right. The day had been saved. And there was no way of knowing what would have happened if he had left the government to take care of it.

But he had betrayed them. Schroeder. The task force. And ever since he did, he was convinced that it was only a matter of time before they found out.

So he sat there and stared at the most important person in his life. Ella. Tears came to his eyes. What would she think when she found out about it? What would it be like for her, growing up without her father? Would she be better off without him? He looked at the wall on his left, where he had two large pictures hung in lacquered wooden frames. One was of his wife, Rose, smiling like an angel, the year they got married. The other was of Ella as a newborn, mottled red with wispy black hair clinging to her knobby head. Tears came to his eyes and began streaming down his face.

Chapman took a deep breath. Get a grip, he told himself. You did the right thing. You’re not dead yet.

That’s when he heard the creak of the wooden floor on the hall outside the den. He reached for the lower right drawer, where he kept a concealed handgun, and slowly pulled it open. He drew the gun as a man appeared in the doorway, but in a flash of recognition did not pull the trigger.

It was Smith.

“Polite guests use the doorbell,” said Chapman.

“I use the doorbell when it pleases me to use the doorbell,” said Smith.

“Supposing I shoot you,” he offered.

“You could try,” said Smith. “I frankly don’t think it would do much good.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Chapman. “Why are you here, Smith?”

Smith walked on light feet to the chair opposite Chapman and sat down. “I imagine you might be feeling a little . . . guilty at the moment. I thought you could use a friendly word.”

Chapman snorted wearily. “From you?”

“Yes,” said Smith unflappably. “I’d like to tell you that it’s normal to feel as you do. Like you have betrayed something. But your motives were pure and your perceptions correct.” His voice was steady and emotionless. “You did what was necessary to protect your country and your daughter. You were a necessary part in stopping a catastrophe. And for that you deserve applause.”

“Hooray for me,” he said hollowly. “Is now the time when you give me my thirty pieces of silver?”

“Don’t be dramatic,” said Smith. “You didn’t do this for the money. You did it because it was right. And if it comes to it again, you will help us again.”

“Do I get a choice?”

“You always have a choice,” said Smith, standing up. He walked to the door, then looked back at Chapman. “Welcome to the team.”

“A success, all in all,” said Bloch.

Smith looked at her pointedly.

“A success?” asked Smith.

Bloch was sitting in the passenger seat of Smith’s car, in the Government Center garage, staring at a concrete wall. It was a dreary place for a meet, but garages worked for their isolation and accessibility. She ran her eyes over cracks on the wall as she spoke.

“A qualified success,” she said. “Disaster was averted. The infectious agent was contained.”

“Novokoff was killed in the middle of a crowd, in a way that people are going to be talking about for a long, long time. There are pictures, too many to control. I’d call that by itself a disaster.”

“It was all we could do to stop him from spreading the fungus to the entire city of New York,” she said.

“And using the satellite like that tipped our hand to the Chinese. They naturally blamed the United States for what happened, which might have caused an international incident. The U.S. is going to pay for this diplomatically.”

“It was the only way.”

“So you keep saying,” said Smith sharply. “But operations seem to be getting sloppy. Loud. And it all seems to have something to do with Morgan.”

“Morgan is a valuable agent,” said Bloch. “He’s been instrumental to our operations.”

“He’s erratic and difficult to control,” said Smith.

“He’s also our best. Without him, we wouldn’t have gotten Novokoff. Or Edmund Charles, for that matter.”

“If you are speaking for Morgan, I would think that you would avoid mentioning the name of Edmund Charles,” Smith said testily.

“It’s true, though, isn’t it?” said Bloch. “He might cause a splash. But he gets results.”

Smith took a deep breath. “That he does. That he does.”

“By the way, what happened to the confiscated cocaine with the fungal spores?” Bloch asked.

“It was destroyed, of course,” said Smith. “Incinerated, along with all the records in the Montauk facility.”

“Good,” she said. “The world is better off without its existence.”

“That it is,” said Smith.

“So what now?” she asked.

“Now we move ahead with expansion,” he said. “Get the Zeta facility staffed. Two tactical teams of six and a full support staff of analysts and security experts.”

“Even after what you called a failure?” she said evenly.

“It is not my decision to make,” he said. Then he touched her on the shoulder and looked her in the eye. “But this is my personal advice: rein in your people, and get Zeta Division in order. The higher-ups will not go easy on you if you continue to act so publicly.”

“I . . . appreciate your perspective,” she said, in a tone that said she didn’t. “So, what now?”

“The world never stops,” said Smith. “There will be something else to deal with soon enough, and just the job of keeping watch takes up enough man power. Something will come up soon enough.”

CHAPTER 62

Andover, March 20

Morgan pulled the rental into his driveway and walked into his house for the first time in the past week. It was finally warm, the first morning of spring. He ached all over and it still hurt to move, but it felt good to come home.

He closed the door to the garage and turned to see Jenny standing in the kitchen, staring at him in stunned silence. A broad smile formed on his face, and she ran into his arms. She kissed him deeply, and he took in her scent, felt the warmth of her body. It was heaven.

Finally, she broke the kiss and gazed lovingly into his eyes. “So it’s really over then?”

“It’s really over,” he said.

She hugged him, and when she released he saw that there were tears in her eyes.

“How are your wrists?” he asked, holding her hands tenderly.

“Feeling a lot better.”

“Alex?”

“She’s out,” said Jenny. “Should be back to eat with us. But she’s doing okay. Less nervous since it’s hit the news that the people behind the attacks have been caught.”

He embraced her and kissed her again. But there was something else on his mind.

“Did you really mean what you said?”asked Morgan. “That you think I should stay in this line of work? That I shouldn’t quit being a spy?”

Jenny bit her lip, smiling, though her face betrayed a subtle sadness. “It’s who you are,” she said. “It’s something you can offer the world that no one else can. I won’t stand in the way of that. But I’ll be here, waiting for you every time.”

They held each other for a few moments; then Jenny pulled away. “I came in here to make lunch. Would you set the table for three, Dan?”

As he pulled the plates out of the cupboard, Morgan’s cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket, then thought better of it and put it back in. Whatever it was, it could wait.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Michaela Hamilton, my brilliant, patient, and kind editor, thank you for believing in me, and for helping me improve what I brought to you. I also want to thank my remarkable team at Kensington, including my publicist Adeola Saul, Lesleigh Irish-Underwood, and Alexandra Nicolajsen, as well as the entire sales/marketing team.

I also want to give special thanks to Katy Nastro, my social media guru, Candy O’Terry, a Boston radio personality who has gotten me a great deal of on-air exposure, Caio Camargo, who helps me bring my ideas to life on paper, and to bestselling author John Gilstrap, who has become a friend and mentor over the last year. As always, thank you, Lynn, for being there and helping in any way you can throughout this entire journey. I couldn’t have done it without you.

In case you missed Leo J. Maloney’s exciting debut

TERMINATION ORDERS

Keep reading for an exciting teaser excerpt . . .

CHAPTER 1

Three sharp raps at the door yanked young Zalmay Siddiqi from uneasy dreams, and the adrenaline hit him like a kick in the face. He froze with the primitive instinct of a rabbit cornered by a fox, hoping against hope that whatever predator had come knocking would go away of its own volition. He listened. The knocks came in a familiar pattern of three shorts and three longs: Cougar’s signal. As his blazing panic subsided, he realized that he had been holding his breath. He exhaled, but the smoldering dread remained. Even friendly knocks were unwelcome in the middle of the night.

He rolled nimbly out of bed and pulled the lanyard on the light fixture above him, spilling the bulb’s dim yellow glow onto the sparsely furnished room: a lone mattress on the floor, a plastic chair draped with his clothes, his few possessions huddled in a corner where cracked plaster walls exposed the concrete underneath.

Tugging on a plain Afghan khameez tunic and salwar trousers made of rough cloth, he hurried out of the bedroom to the hallway door. The knocks were still coming intermittently in their steady pattern. Zalmay gingerly turned the lock, and no sooner was the dead bolt released than the door was flung open, nearly knocking Zalmay back into the wall. A tall, wiry American, a man he knew as Cougar, rushed into the apartment, also wearing Afghan garb and carrying a black duffel bag. His movements were jerky, his voice breathless.

“Grab your things. You’ve got thirty seconds.”

Zalmay’s thoughts were forming a protest at Cougar’s abruptness, but the urgency in the American’s speech stayed his tongue. With a sudden clarity, he asked only, “Am I coming back?”

“No,” Cougar responded, and he looked over his shoulder. “Pack only what you can’t live without.”

Cougar stood at the door, his head cocked like that of a prey animal listening for stalking predators. Zalmay threw his single other outfit and his prayer mat into a canvas knapsack. From under his mattress, he took out a slim roll of cash tied with a rubber band. He reached in again, pulled out a creased old photograph, and hid it, along with the money, in the folds of his shirt. Then he turned to face Cougar, doing his best to look brave.

“I have been expecting this,” he said. “I am ready.”

Fear and anxiety had marked Zalmay’s life since he’d met the American and agreed to help him. Zalmay was well aware of the consequences of being caught. The thought usually kept him awake and tossing on his mattress at night. And on this particular night, his nightmare had finally come calling. He could only feel glad that it was his friend and not an enemy assassin at his door.

“Good,” said Cougar, “Now let’s . . .” Cougar trailed off and turned his head as if listening for something. Then Zalmay heard it, too, and it stopped him cold. It was the rumbling motor of an approaching car, which came to a halt down below the open window. Zalmay walked to the window to see who it was. Looking down, he saw a black sedan with two men climbing out of it, Americans in Western suits, each with a submachine gun in his hand.

“No, get away from there!” said Cougar.

Too late—one of the men below looked up, called to the other, and pointed right at Zalmay. Both black-suited men dashed for the door of the building. Zalmay’s apartment was on the corner, all the way down the hall; the men would have no trouble at all finding them.

“Come on!” said Cougar, motioning for him to go out the door. Zalmay dashed out and was halfway down the hall, past a row of silent, closed doors on his right, when he noticed that Cougar had stayed behind to shut the door to the apartment. He waited, nervously, as Cougar caught up, and they hurried to the stairs. From there, he could already hear the footsteps of the two men scrambling up, closing the distance with each footfall. Zalmay’s apartment was only three floors up, so it wouldn’t take them long to get there. And there was no other way out.

Cougar drew his weapon from its shoulder holster. “Upstairs,” he whispered. “Quietly.” He took the lead, and they tiptoed up a flight of stairs, keeping their footsteps as light as possible. Cougar crouched behind the bend of the fourth-floor corridor, and Zalmay ducked behind him, breathing heavily, his mind blank with panic, the way a rabbit must feel when confronting a tiger. The American kept his Glock pointed toward the stairwell as the sound of the men’s shoes on the steps grew louder and louder, and then they heard the footsteps receding down the hallway toward Zalmay’s apartment.

“Zalmay,” whispered Cougar, pulling a set of keys from his pocket, holding them tightly in his palm so they would not jangle. “Take these. I’m going to hold them off. While they’re searching your apartment, you run down as fast as you can and start the car. If I’m not the first one down, you take off without me, understand?”

“But . . .”

“Don’t argue, just go. Now, after me!”

Cougar walked back down the flight of stairs, quickly and silently, leading with his shoulder, arm extended and gun pointing down, at the ready. They heard a crack as the men kicked in Zalmay’s door. Before reaching the landing on the third floor, Cougar motioned for Zalmay to jump over the rusting railing onto the next flight down, so he wouldn’t be seen from the hallway. Zalmay clambered over and vaulted down, but his foot slipped on the metal, and his arm smacked painfully on the railing below. A hollow, metallic sound echoed up the stairwell. They heard voices and then the sound of the two men running out of the apartment.

“Go!” said Cougar. “I’ll hold them off!”

Zalmay nodded and started down. He leapt down the stairs two steps at a time, one hand clutching the keys and the other the strap of his knapsack, which was slung over his shoulder and slammed against him with every step.

Gunshots, three sets of them, blasted through the hallway upstairs; the single reports from Cougar’s Glock were answered by volleys of fire from the two men’s semiautomatics. He slowed down and for a split second considered going back to help his friend. Honor demanded it. But no; Cougar had told him to go on ahead, so that is what he would do. He had learned that the honorable thing to do was not always the right thing. He pressed on, and an inchoate, wordless prayer for his friend’s survival formed in his mind.

Zalmay raced into the dusty night air, easily spotting Cougar’s beat-up jeep, parked at a hasty angle to the building, the headlights left on like the still-open eyes of a dead ox. He pulled the door open and swung into the driver’s seat, tossing the knapsack onto the seat beside him. He fumbled to slide the key into the ignition and then turned it; the engine rumbled to life. Gunshots reverberated from inside, but now they came from much closer. Cougar had made his way down the stairs. Zalmay leaned over to unlatch the passenger door and then kicked it wide.

Cougar burst out of the building. He stopped just long enough to shoot out one of the front tires of the men’s sedan. Then he ran over and hurtled into the jeep’s passenger seat, pulling the door shut as he did in one fluid motion, yelling, “Go, go, go!” Zalmay saw the two men appear at the door as he hit the gas. They sped off under a barrage of bullets. Several slammed into the back of the jeep, making dull, metallic thunks, and one shattered the rear window. Zalmay mashed the pedal to the floor. The sound of gunfire slowly faded in the distance and then stopped altogether.

“Are you okay?” Zalmay asked, his eyes on the dark dirt road. “Were you hit?”

“Still in one piece,” Cougar said, with ragged breath and looking back. “You?”

“I am fine. Are they behind us?”

“They won’t be getting far. Not in that car.”

Zalmay exhaled. “Where are we going?”

“Turn here.” Zalmay turned the jeep into a narrow side street. “We’ll take the inner roads, just to be safe,” Cougar added. “It’s best to make sure we’re not easy to follow.”

Zalmay breathed deeply, trying to calm his frantically beating heart. “Where are we going?” he asked again.

“Highway One, toward Kabul,” said Cougar, shuffling through his duffel bag.

“We are going to Kabul?”

“You’re going to Kabul,” Cougar replied pointedly. “And then out of the country.”

“You are not coming, then?” Zalmay said, trying his best to hide his anxiety and disappointment. Cougar did not respond, and Zalmay didn’t press it. He knew the answer already.

“I need you to bring something with you when you go,” said Cougar.

He reached into a pocket and produced a small black plastic chip, no bigger than his fingernail: a camera’s memory card. “You know what’s in there?” Cougar said.

“Is that what those men were after? The photographs?”

Cougar nodded. “This, and you.”

“How did they know?”

“I tried to transfer them electronically, and the files were intercepted. That’s how they knew to look for us. Now I can’t get them through from here—they’re watching every single connection. It needs to be carried out of here. And you’re going to be responsible for getting it to the U.S. and into the right hands.”

“America . . .” he said in a whisper barely audible over the engine’s growl. Through everything that had happened, the dream of going to that Promised Land had never left his mind. But he had never allowed himself to fully believe it was possible. To hear Cougar say it now suddenly made it a reality.

“We’ll travel together as far as possible, but it’s better if you don’t take the jeep. If nothing else, these fresh bullet holes are going to be a tad suspicious. We’ll stop where you can find alternate transportation—something less conspicuous.”

“But, Cougar . . .”

“We don’t have much time, so let me finish. While you’re on the road, tell no one your real name. Call as little attention to yourself as possible. If you have any identification, get rid of it now. Burn it, or toss it into a storm drain or down a well. Do what you can to change your appearance. You have some money; here’s more.” Cougar handed him a wad of bills—American currency. “If anyone asks, you’re visiting family in Kabul. Come up with a story, and practice it. And always keep an eye out for tails, just like I taught you. I can’t promise you’ll make it there safely, between the Taliban and our American friends. But I’ve done all I can to give you a fighting chance.”

Zalmay sat in silence as the morning twilight rose upon the city, making it appear ghostly and unreal. Even now, while they drove alongside light traffic on an arterial road, the scene already felt like a distant memory.

“Why will you not come with me to Kabul?” he asked.

Cougar hesitated, as if gathering his thoughts. “This is the safest way for both of us. I can’t get us a flight out of here, not anymore, and I would attract too much attention on the highway, from soldiers and the Taliban.”

“The Taliban!” Zalmay bristled. “They would have no love for me, either, if they knew I have been helping you.”

“Plus,” Cougar added, ignoring Zalmay’s interruption, “I have some unfinished business here.” He gave a wry smile.

“I will stay and help you,” Zalmay declared. “I am not afraid.”

“No way.”

“I want to stay,” he protested, and anger welled up in him. “I want to stay and fight!”

Cougar sighed and took on a stern but fatherly tone. “I need this memory card delivered. I can’t do it myself, and there’s no one else I can count on to do it. This is your mission, Zalmay.”

Zalmay looked away. “It is a coward’s mission. ”

Cougar frowned, and his tone became distinctly one of rebuke. “This isn’t about you proving yourself, Zalmay. Delivering those photos is our top priority. People’s lives might depend on those pictures getting into the right hands. If you want to do something meaningful, this is it.”

Zalmay assented wordlessly. Then he scowled and looked out the window as Cougar proceeded to give him specific instructions for what to do in Kabul. Being sent away like this filled him with shame, because he would be unable to help his friend right there in Kandahar. At the same time, his heart ached with thoughts of America, which had always seemed so impossibly far but was now so tantalizingly close—and that filled him with even more guilt, the guilt of choosing a comfortable life while others like him would remain no better off. Ultimately, he knew that Cougar was right. For now, however, he needed to brood.

With daylight approaching, the city was beginning to show signs of life. They were on the outskirts now, where the streets gave way to Highway 1. This highway was one of the Coalition’s most ambitious projects in Afghanistan, cooperatively built by troops from among twenty-six NATO partner countries. Once called the Ring Road, the highway stretched to the capital and beyond, going around the entire country before coming full circle back to Kandahar from the west.

Cougar had Zalmay pull over to the side of the road a short distance from a small bazaar where many drivers stopped for food and tea and to trade information about the conditions of the road before the haul to Kabul.

As Zalmay and Cougar popped open the doors and climbed out of the jeep, the muezzins’ voices began to drone over the minaret loudspeakers, calling all Muslims to their morning prayer. Zalmay’s hand instinctively went for his prayer mat.

“I’m sorry, my friend, I can’t wait for prayers,” said Cougar. “But I’m confident Allah will forgive a short delay while you say good-bye to a dear friend.”

Zalmay smiled, and they embraced tenderly.

“Thank you, Cougar.”

The older man laughed hollowly. “I’m the one who should be thanking you, Zalmay. You did far, far more than anyone could ask for.”

“And yet I am eternally grateful to you.”

Cougar nodded, and Zalmay knew that he understood.

“I’m sorry you have to go alone, Zalmay. But I promise you, what you’re doing is important. I’m counting on you.”

Zalmay nodded in assent. “Will we meet again?”

“In the States, if everything goes right. And let’s pray that it will. Good-bye, Zalmay.”

“Good-bye, Cougar. Peace be upon you.”

Zalmay gave the American the keys to the jeep and watched him as he climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Zalmay watched him as he drove off, feeling more the loss of his friend than of leaving his home. When Cougar disappeared into the city, Zalmay turned his thoughts to the road ahead: a harsh, dry land punctuated with towns and villages and a thousand enemies between him and his destination.

CHAPTER 2

Dan Morgan turned onto the small suburban cul-de-sac, the familiar tightness gripping his knee as he forced himself with gritted teeth to pound the pavement harder. Embrace the pain; love the pain. He pressed on for the last few dozen yards to his house, feeling the cutting chill of the early-March air in his throat as he inhaled.

Neika, who absolutely would not be tired out, had been straining at her leash to chase a squirrel but now set her sights on home. She let out a frustrated half bark, half whimper, muffled and choked off by her collar. Somehow, she still retained the exuberant energy of a puppy, but he knew she could really do some damage when she was threatened.

“Easy, girl,” Morgan chuckled. He broke into a slow trot and then slowed to a smooth stroll as he walked into his front yard. He took a minute outside to catch his breath, letting Neika off her leash. She trotted into the garage to sit at the kitchen door, panting, tongue lolling, and eyeing him impatiently.

Morgan stretched his calves and, feeling another jolt of pain, rubbed his aching knee. “Well, Dan,” he muttered to himself as he opened the door and Neika plowed inside, “I guess you’re officially not a young man anymore.”

As with everything else, Morgan took aging stoically in stride, even now, with forty-one just around the corner. However, those little signs that his body was no longer what it once was always had their own particular sting, especially in the way that they carried a stark reminder of the life he no longer led.

As he walked into the house, he was met by the smell of coffee and frying bacon. His daughter, Alex, was at the stove, cracking eggs on the edge of a skillet. She was as tall as he, and her brown hair had been recently cut shorter, to chin-length. She combined Morgan’s athleticism with Jenny’s slender frame, and even her casual movements were full of grace.

“Well, this is a nice surprise,” he said.

She turned around nonchalantly, looking at him with sharp, intelligent eyes, and gave him a good-natured smile. “Mom’s out running errands, so I thought I’d be a good kid and make breakfast.” Alex turned back to the counter and scooped crispy strips of bacon from the skillet onto a paper towel.

“Are you sure you should be handling bacon?” Morgan asked, gently ribbing. “Isn’t that against the rules?” She had not eaten meat for nearly three months.

Alex laughed. “Whatever rules there are, Dad, I’m the one who makes them.”

“So it wouldn’t actually be cheating if you had some, just this once?” He grinned with feigned hopefulness.

“And look, eggs over easy, just the way you like ’em,” she said, ignoring his comment. She poked the spatula at one of the three sizzling in the pan and then, a bit too abruptly, flipped it over. The yolk began to ooze out from under it. “Ah, crap.”

Morgan walked over to her and reached for the spatula. “Here, let me show you.”

“I think I can handle frying an egg, Dad.” That was his daughter: independent to the bone.

Neika, who had gotten her fill at her water bowl, sauntered over to beg for scraps.

“Nothing for you here, puppy,” Alex said. The coffeemaker sputtered, then beeped as the last of the brew dripped into the pot. She poured out two mugs and scooped two spoonfuls of sugar into one. “Still take yours black, Dad?”

“You got it.”

She handed him a mug and took a sip from hers. “Ooh, sweet, sweet caffeine.”

“So,” he said, “big plans for the weekend?”

“Oh, I might meet up with Tom and Robbie later today, if they’re around. Nothing definite yet.”

While she fussed with the eggs in the skillet, he took a moment to regard her, with her new and yet-unfamiliar chin-length hair. She really was becoming a lovely young woman, charming and vivacious. It was more than that, though: there was something about her that seemed much more composed and self-assured than the moody adolescent she had been even six months ago, when she had turned sixteen. He had always been unconditionally proud of her, but, now more than ever, she seemed to really command it.

“So, your mother mentioned there’s a boy you’ve been seeing,” he said, as casually and good-naturedly as possible. He expected her to roll her eyes and clam up, but he was surprised to find not a hint of annoyance in her voice.

“His name is Dylan, Dad. He’s a good guy, and I like him a lot.”

“That’s great, sweetie. I’m happy for you.”

“And if you promise to behave,” she said, “I might even bring him home to meet you.”

He grinned and sipped his coffee. It was steaming hot, and it made him realize how cold he was. “How did you two meet?”

“An APS event.”

“APS?”

“You know,” she said. “Americans for a Peaceful Society. Remember I told you I joined up?”

“Oh, the peaceniks . . .” said Morgan, chuckling, He sipped more coffee.

“I think the preferred term is pacifist, Dad,” she said, with an edge of irritation to her voice.

“In the sixties they called them hippies.” He had meant the comment to be good-natured, but he knew immediately it was the wrong thing to say at the wrong time.

Alex scowled. “I guess it would be too much to ask for you to take me seriously.”

Morgan frowned. Things seemed to have taken a turn rather quickly. “I didn’t mean . . .”

“I know what you meant,” she said dryly. “I know how much respect you have for people like—well, people like me, I guess.”

“Of course I respect you, Alex,” he said. “But you have to admit, this whole pacifist thing tends to be a bit . . . unrealistic , don’t you think?” He was trying hard not to anger her, to humor her, this new passion of hers, but he could tell he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. So much for being a master of deception, he thought.

“Dad, do you know what’s happening out there? Do you know how many soldiers are dying in our wars? How many civilians? Just innocent bystanders, at home, going to work or to school? Do you know, Dad, what our government does to terror suspects, many of whom turn out to be innocent?”

He nodded. He wanted to tell her he knew more than she could imagine. He wanted to tell her things he had not only heard about but seen. Instead, he bit his lip and let her continue.

“So maybe APS is a small ripple in a big pond. So maybe I can’t change the world. At least I’m doing something .”

Dan bit down harder, doing his best to keep from saying something he might regret. “Maybe, Alex. But the truth is, there are evil people in this world. People who would much rather you and I and everyone we know be dead. It’s not like we go to war just for the fun of it. The people who make those decisions always weigh everything carefully, to make sure it’s really, absolutely necessary.”

She scoffed. “Right. And even then, it still never seems to solve anything, does it?”

“Isn’t it ironic,” Morgan said, grinning in an attempt to change the tone of the conversation, “that we’re fighting over this?”

One of the eggs in the skillet let out a loud pop. Alex sighed. “How about you go sit down, I’ll bring breakfast in a minute, and we’ll forget I ever mentioned anything?”

It may not have been much, but it was a peace offering of sorts. Morgan took it as an opening. “Truce, then?”

“Truce.”

“Hey, listen,” he said. “I was saving this until after breakfast, but, you know, the Bruins are playing at the Garden this Friday. I thought you might like to go, too.”

“Yeah, Dad,” she said, with a measure of genuine excitement in her voice, though still tempered with her irritation. “I’d love to.” Sports had always been their bond; whatever the arguments between them, this common ground brought them together. He wondered if it would be enough as she grew older and drifted further and further away. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, that he would do anything for her happiness.

“Okay, then,” he said instead, and he turned to walk into the dining room. The table was set for breakfast for two, the silverware slightly askew but with pretensions of luxury, like linen napkins clumsily folded into fans, and a copy of the Boston Globe sitting neatly next to his plate. What a sweet kid, he thought, even if she was a little misguided by her own naivety. He sat heavily into the chair, relieving his knees with a sigh, and shivered at the chill of his damp shirt against his skin as he leaned back.

He picked up the paper and flipped through to the National section, which had a long piece on Lana McKay, an up-and-coming senator from Ohio who was making waves in Washington. A fresh face in politics, she had been catapulted into the national spotlight in the past year by her powerful appeals to ethics and political reform. She was bold, had a reputation for getting things done, and had emerged as a presidential hopeful in the next election. Morgan knew well how political fads came and went, and he knew even better that politicians sang a radically different tune inside their cabinets than they did to the press. But even he thought there might be something to this one.

He scanned the article but he couldn’t concentrate on the words; his heart just wasn’t in national affairs at the moment. Then he looked below the fold to find the smarmy mug of Senator Edgar Nickerson smiling at him. He and McKay were shaking hands at some political event. It made sense, of course, for McKay to be seen with the man widely considered to be the most trusted politician in America. But Morgan’s image of her suffered from the association. Nickerson was one of the top players in DC—an old-money aristocrat who had a way of making people trust him implicitly. But Morgan knew better than to believe his public image: the man knew how to play the political game, with a reputation among insiders for masterful behind-the-scenes manipulations that no one ever dared speak of aloud for fear of reprisal.

Morgan decided he wouldn’t let politics spoil what was already not the most pleasant of days, so he turned to the sports page for a March Madness update and was immersed in reading when the doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it!” he called out to Alex. He walked to the foyer and opened the front door to find a narrow-shouldered man with thinning blond hair and nervous eyes. It was a familiar face, and one he thought he’d never see again. It fell somewhat short of being a pleasant surprise.

“What the hell are you doing here, Plante?”

“Hello, Cobra. How are you?” said the man softly, with an edge of anxiety to his voice. “It’s been a long time.”

“There’s no Cobra here,” said Morgan. “Not anymore.”

“Would you rather I called you by your civilian name?” Plante asked. “I can do that, if you prefer.”

“I would rather you tell me what the hell you’re doing at my front door,” said Morgan. “Or are you here just to catch up on old times?”

“I need to talk to you,” said Plante, the apprehension obvious in his tone. “Please.”

“Dad, who is it?” called Alex from the kitchen.

“Just a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses, sweetie, ” he yelled to her. Then he turned back to Plante. “You know what? I changed my mind. I don’t care why you’re here. Get the hell off my property before I exercise my right to shoot you as a trespasser.”

“Won’t you—”

“Listen here,” Morgan interrupted, lowering his voice to a growl. “I don’t work for you anymore. Whatever it is, I don’t care. It’s not my problem. It belongs to you and the rest of the clowns at the Agency.”

“What if I told you it’s a matter of life and death? What if I told you no one else could help us?”

“Jesus, it’s always life and death with you people, isn’t it?”

“You know that better than anyone else, don’t you, Cobra?”

Morgan gritted his teeth. “Listen, Plante, my daughter’s here, and she just cooked my breakfast. So I’m going in, and I’m going to sit down with her and eat, and you’re going to get the hell away from me and my family.”

“You won’t even listen to what I have to say?”

“There’s nothing you can say, Plante. Now, go away.” Morgan began to swing the door shut.

“Cobra, it’s Cougar,” said Plante. The name stopped Morgan dead in his tracks. “Your old partner, Peter Conley. He’s been killed. I’m sorry to tell you like this. But now you’re the only one who can help us.”

Morgan looked at Plante in shock, then took a deep breath.

“Fine. You can come in. But if I find out you’re bullshitting me . . .”

Morgan stepped aside to let Plante into his home. And just like that, his past had flooded back to wash away his life of suburban tranquility.

© Kippy Goldfarb/Carolle Photography

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LEO MALONEY was born in Massachusetts, where he spent his childhood and graduated from high school and Northeastern University. After being inducted into the army, he was recruited to become a black ops contractor for a clandestine government agency, and his life changed forever. He traveled the world—to Vietnam, Cambodia, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and other strategically important hotspots. As an independent contractor, he was never required to accept a particular assignment, but rather selected ones that met his requirement that it was in the best interest of the country, although once a mission was underway, there was no turning back.

While he was serving his country in the secretive world of black ops over a period of over thirty years, he operated several “cover” businesses including a classic car brokerage, promotions and limousine companies, and a detective agency.

After leaving his career in black ops, Leo continued several of his cover businesses, and also had the opportunity to try his hand at acting in independent films and TV commercials. Leo has ten movies to his credit both as an actor and behind the camera as a producer, technical advisor, and assistant director. He performed dual roles as a featured performer (a Boston police captain) and technical advisor in the movie 27 Down. He is the associate producer for the disaster film CO_2, and he both performed the role of Judge and was the producer for the Christian-themed Luke Eleven. Leo has appeared in several other films, including Revenge as Special Agent Andrew Gar-nell of the FBI in Boston.

Turning his real-life experiences into fiction, he wrote the acclaimed thriller Termination Orders. He is working on the next thriller featuring Dan Morgan. To learn more, please visit www.leojmaloney.com.

that it was in the best interest of the country, although once a mission was underway, there was no turning back.

While he was serving his country in the secretive world of black ops over a period of over thirty years, he operated several “cover” businesses including a classic car brokerage, promotions and limousine companies, and a detective agency.

After leaving his career in black ops, Leo continued several of his cover businesses, and also had the opportunity to try his hand at acting in independent films and TV commercials. Leo has ten movies to his credit both as an actor and behind the camera as a producer, technical advisor, and assistant director. He performed dual roles as a featured performer (a Boston police captain) and technical advisor in the movie 27 Down. He is the associate producer for the disaster film CO_2, and he both performed the role of Judge and was the producer for the Christian-themed Luke Eleven. Leo has appeared in several other films, including Revenge as Special Agent Andrew Gar-nell of the FBI in Boston.

Turning his real-life experiences into fiction, he wrote the acclaimed thriller Termination Orders. He is working on the next thriller featuring Dan Morgan. To learn more, please visit www.leojmaloney.com.

PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp.

119 West 40th Street

New York, NY 10018

Copyright © 2013 Leo J. Maloney

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

ISBN: 978-0-7860-2991-4

First electronic edition: September 2013

ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-2992-1

ISBN-10: 0-7860-2992-7