for five minutes, from four-ten to four fifteen
Hood thanked her then looked at Herbert.
"I've got to get going," Hood said.
"My appointment's in forty minutes."
"You don't look happy," Herbert said.
"I'm not," Hood said.
"Can we get someone to nail down who Fenwick is meeting in New York?"
"Mike was able to connect with someone at the State Department when you
two were up there," Herbert said.
"Who?"
"Lisa Baroni," Herbert told him.
"She was a liaison with the parents during the crisis."
"I didn't meet her," Hood said.
"How did Mike find her?"
"He did what any good spymaster does," Herbert said.
"When he's someplace new, he looks for the unhappy employee and promises
them something better if they deliver. Let's see if she can deliver."
"Good," Hood said as he rose.
"God. I feel like I do whenever I go to Christmas Eve Mass."
"And how is that?" Herbert asked.
"Guilty that you don't go to church more often?"
"No," Hood replied.
"I feel like there's something going on that's much bigger than me. And
I'm afraid that when I figure out what that is, it's going to scare the
hell out of me."
"Isn't that what church is supposed to be about?" Herbert asked.
Hood thought about that for a moment. Then he grinned as he left the
office, "louche," he said.
"Good luck," Herbert replied as he wheeled out after him.
Gobustan, Azerbaijan Monday, 11:56 p.m.
Gobustan is a small, rustic village located forty-three miles south of
Baku. The region was settled as far back as 8000 b.c. and is riddled by
caves and towering outcroppings of rock. The caves boast prehistoric
art as well as more recent forms of expression--graffiti left two
thousand years ago by Roman legionnaires.
Situated low in the foothills, just beneath the caves, are several
shepherds' shacks. Spread out over hundreds of acres of graze able
land, they were built early in the century and most of them remain in
use, though not always by men tending their flocks. One large shack is
hidden behind a rock that commands a view of the entire village. The
only way up is along a rutted dirt road cut through the foothills by
millennia of foot traffic and erosion.
Inside, five men sat around a rickety wooden table in the center of the
small room. Another man sat on a chair by a window overlooking the
road. There was an Uzi in his lap. A seventh man was still in Baku,
watching the hospital. They weren't sure when the patient would arrive,
but when he did, Maurice Charles wanted his man to be ready.
The window was open, and a cool breeze was blowing in. Except for the
occasional hooting of an owl or rocks dislodged by prowling foxes in
search of field mice, there was silence outside the shack--the kind of
silence that the Harpooner rarely heard in his travels around the world.
Except for Charles, the men were stripped to their shorts. They were
studying photographs that had been received through a satellite uplink.
The portable six-inch dish had been mounted on the top of the shack,
which had an unobstructed view of the southeastern sky and the
GorizonT3. Located 35,736 kilometers above twenty-one degrees
twenty-five minutes north, sixty degrees twenty-seven minutes east, that
was the satellite the United States National Reconnaissance Office used
to keep watch on the Caspian Sea. Charles's American contact had given
him the restricted web site and access code, and he had downloaded
images from the past twenty-four hours.
The decoder they used, a Stellar Photo Judge 7, had also been provided
by Charles's contact through one of the embassies. It was a compact
unit roughly the size and configuration of a fax machine. The SPJ 7
that could not be faxed or electronically transmitted. Any attempt to
do so would be like pressing on a liquid crystal display. All the
receiver would see was a smudge. The unit provided magnification with a
resolution of ten meters. Combined with infrared lenses on the
satellite, he was able to read the numbers on the wing of the plane.
Charles smiled. His plane was on the image. Or rather, the Azerbaijani
plane that they had bought.
"Are you certain the Americans will find that when they go looking for
clues?" asked one of the men. He was a short, husky, swarthy man with
a shaved head and dark, deep-set eyes. A hand-rolled cigarette hung
from his downturned lips. There was a tattoo of a coiled snake on his
left forearm.
"Our friend will make sure of it," Charles said.
And they would. That was the reason for staging this attack on the
Iranian oil rig. Once the incident occurred, the United States National
Reconnaissance Office would search the satellite database of images from
the Guneshli oil region of the Caspian. Surveillance experts would look
back over the past few days to see who might have been reconnoitering
near the rig. They would find the images of Charles's plane. Then they
would find something else.
Shortly after the attack, a body would be dropped into the sea--the body
of a Russian terrorist, Sergei Cherkassov. Cherkassov had been captured
by Azerbaijan in the NK, freed from prison by Charles's men, and was
presently being held on the Rachel. Cherkassov would be killed shortly
before the attack, shot with a shell from an Iranian-made Gewehr 3
rifle. That was the same kind of bullet that would have been fired by
security personnel on the rig. When the Russian's body was found-thanks
to intelligence that would be leaked to the CIA--the Americans would
find photographs in the terrorist's pockets: the photographs Charles had
taken from the airplane. One of those photographs would show portions
of the airplane's wing and the same numbers seen in the satellite view.
Another of the photographs would have markings in grease pencil showing
the spot that particular terrorist was supposed to have attacked.
With the satellite photographs and the body of the terrorist, Charles
had no doubt that the United States and the rest of the world would draw
the conclusion that he and his sponsors wanted them to draw.
The wrong one.
That Russia and Azerbaijan had united to try to force Iran from its
lucrative rigs in Guneshli.
New York, New York Monday, 4:01 p.m.
The State Department maintains two offices in the vicinity of the United
Nations Building on New York's East Side. One is the Office of Foreign
Missions and the other is the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
Forty-three-year-old attorney Lisa Baroni was the assistant director of
diplomatic claims for the Diplomatic Liaison Office. That meant
whenever a diplomat had a problem with the United States' legal system,
she became involved. A legal problem could mean anything from an
allegedly unlawful search of a diplomat's luggage at one of the local
airports, or a hit-and-run accident involving a diplomat, to the recent
seizure of the Security Council by terrorists.
Ten days before, Baroni had been on hand to provide counsel for
diplomats but found herself giving comfort to parents of children who
were held hostage during the attack. That was when she'd met General
Mike Rodgers.
The general talked with her briefly when the siege was over. He said he
was impressed by the way she had remained calm, communicative, and
responsible in the midst of the crisis. He explained that he was the
new head of Op-Center in Washington and was looking for good people to
work with. He asked if he could call her and arrange an interview.
Rodgers had seemed like a no nonsense officer, one who was more
interested in her talent than her gender, in her abilities more than in
the length of her skirt. That appealed to her. So did the prospect of
going back to Washington, D.C. Baroni had grown up there, she had
studied international law at Georgetown University, and all her friends
and family still lived there. After three years in New York, Baroni
could not wait to get back.
But when General Rodgers finally called, it was not quite the call
Baroni had been expecting.
It came early in the afternoon. Baroni listened as Rodgers explained
that his superior, Paul Hood, had withdrawn his resignation. But
Rodgers was still looking for good people and offered her a proposition.
He had checked her State Department records and thought she would be a
good candidate to replace Martha Mackall, the political officer who had
been assassinated in Spain. He would bring her to Washington for an
interview if she would help him with a problem in New York.
Baroni asked if the help he needed was legal. Rodgers assured her it
was. In that case, Baroni told him, she would be happy to help. That
was how relationships were forged in Washington. Through
back-scratching.
What Rodgers needed, he explained, was the itinerary of NSA Chief Jack
Fenwick who was in New York for meetings with United Nations delegates.
Rodgers said he didn't want the published itinerary. He wanted to know
where Fenwick actually ended up.
That should have been relatively easy for Baroni to find. Fenwick had
an office in her building, and he usually used it when he came to New
York. It was on the seventh floor, along with the office for the
secretary of state. However, Fenwick's New York deputy said that he
wasn't coming to the office during this trip but was holding all of his
meetings at different consulates.
Instead, Baroni checked the file of government-issued license plates.
This listing was maintained in the event of a diplomatic kidnapping. The
NSA chief always rode in the same town car when he came to New York.
Baroni got the license number and asked her friend. Detective Steve
Mitchell at Midtown South, to try to find the car on the street. Then
she got the number of the car's windshield-mounted electronic security
pass. The ESP enabled vehicles to enter embassy and government parking
garages with a minimum of delay, giving potential assassins less time to
stage ambushes.
The ESP didn't show up on any of the United States checkpoints, which
were transmitted immediately to State Department security files. That
meant that Fenwick was visiting foreign embassies. Over one hundred
nations also transmitted that data to the DOS within minutes. Most of
those were close U.S. allies, such as Great Britain, Japan, and Israel.
Fenwick had not yet gone to visit any of them. She used secure e-mail
to forward to Rodgers the information where Fenwick hadn't been.
Then, just after four p.m." Baroni got a call from Detective Mitchell.
One of his squad cars spotted the chief of staff's car leaving a
building at 622 Third Avenue.
That was just below Forty-second Street. Baroni looked up the address
in her guide to permanent missions.
The occupant surprised her.
Washington, D.C.
Monday, 4:03 p.m.
Paul Hood arrived at the west wing of the White House at four o'clock.
Even before he had finished passing through the security checkpoint, a
presidential intern had arrived to show him to the Oval Office. Hood
could tell he had been here at least several months. Like most seasoned
interns, the freshly scrubbed young man had a slightly cocky air. Here
he was, a kid in his early twenties, working at the White House. The ID
badge around his neck was his trump card with women at bars, with chatty
neighbors on airplanes, with brothers and cousins when he went home for
the holidays. Whatever anyone else said or did, he was interacting with
the president, the vice president, cabinet, and congressional leaders on
a daily basis. He was exposed to real power, he was plugged into the
world, and he was moving past the eyes and ears of all media where the
expressions and casual utterances of even people like him could cause
events that would ripple through history. Hood remembered feeling a lot
of that when he was a kid working in the Los Angeles office of the
governor of California. He could only imagine how much more extreme it
was for this kid, the sense of being at the center of the universe.
The Oval Office is located at the far southeast corner of the West Wing.
Hood followed the young man in silence as they made their way through
the busy corridors, passed by people who did not seem at all self
important They had the look and carriage of people who were very late
for a plane. Hood walked past the office of the national security
adviser and the vice president, then turned east at the vice president's
office and walked past the office of the press secretary. Then they
turned south past the cabinet room. They walked in silence all the
while. Hood wondered if the young man wasn't speaking to him because
the kid had a sense of propriety or because Hood wasn't enough of a
celebrity to merit talking to. Hood decided to give him the benefit of
the doubt.
The office past the cabinet room belonged to Mrs. Leigh. She was seated
behind her desk. Behind it was the only door that led to the Oval
Office. The intern excused himself. Hood and the president's tall,
whitehaired secretary greeted each other with smiles. Mrs. Leigh was
from Texas, with the steel, poise, patience, and dry, self-effacing
humor required for the guardian of the gate. Her husband was the late
Senator Titus Leigh, a legendary cattleman.
"The president's running a few minutes late," Mrs. Leigh said. "But
that's all right. You can tell me how you are."
"Coping," Hood said.
"And you?"
"Fine," she replied flatly.
"My strength is the strength of ten because my heart is pure."
"I've heard that somewhere," Hood said as he continued toward the
secretary's desk.
"It's Lord Tennyson," she replied.
"How is your daughter?"
"She's strong, too," Hood said.
"And she has an awful lot of people pulling for her."
"I don't doubt that," Mrs. Leigh said, still smiling.
"Let me know if there's anything I ca
n do."
"I absolutely will," Hood said. He looked into her gray eyes.
"There is something you can do for me, though."
"And that is?"
"Off the record?"
"Of course," she assured him.
"Mrs. Leigh, has the president seemed all right to you?" Hood asked.
The woman's smile wavered. She looked down.
"Is that what this meeting is about?"
"No," Hood said.
"What makes you ask a question like that?"
"People close to him are worried," Hood said.
"And you're the one who's been asked to bell the cat?" she asked.
"Nothing that calculated," Hood said as his cell phone beeped. He
reached into his jacket pocket and answered the phone.
"This is Paul."
"Paul, it's Mike."
"Mike, what's up?" If Rodgers was calling him here, now, it had to be
important.
"The target was seen leaving the Iranian mission to the UN about three
minutes ago."
"Any idea where he was the rest of the time?" Hood asked.
"Negative," said Rodgers.
"We're working on that. But apparently, the car didn't show up at the
embassies of any of our top allies."
"Thanks," Hood said.
"Let me know if you find out anything else." Hood hung up. He put the