Dead Heat, Page 2

  protecting against the next attack would be lost forever.

  2

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  2:41 A.M.—A REFUGEE CAMP IN NORTHERN JORDAN

  Jon Bennett had no idea that U.S. forces were on the move.

  He had no inkling of the horrifying plot they were about to uncover

  in the Yemeni capital. Nor did he care. Fourteen hundred miles away, in a

  crowded, disease-infested refugee camp in northern Jordan, just minutes

  from the Syrian border, a wave of panic gripped his body as he held his

  wife in his arms and begged her to hang on until help arrived.

  “Erin, talk to me. Look at me, sweetheart. Please.”

  But Erin did not respond. Her breathing was shallow. Her pulse was

  weak. Bennett yelled for a doctor, but no one came. Again and again he

  cried out into the scorching August night—thick with the stench of sweat

  and death—but amid the grotesque cacophony of the masses, no one even

  noticed, much less cared.

  Bennett’s heart was racing. It wasn’t possible. He couldn’t be losing

  her. They had been married less than eight months.

  He had no idea what was wrong, but he couldn’t wait any longer. He

  had to find a doctor, a nurse, a soldier, someone—anyone—who could

  help. Still, he didn’t dare leave Erin alone. What if he took too long? What

  if he came back and it was too late? He would never forgive himself. He’d

  have to take her with him.

  Bennett scooped up Erin’s limp and nearly lifeless body in his arms

  and rushed her out of the small tent that had become their home. Dressed

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  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J O E L C . R O S E N B E R G

  only in the shorts and T-shirt he typically slept in—he wasn’t even wear-

  ing shoes or sandals—he began working his way to the medical compound

  on the other side of the camp. But that proved tougher than expected.

  Even so late at night, large numbers of people remained up and about,

  congregating here and there and clogging the narrow, dusty alleyways that

  crisscrossed through this tent city of nearly five thousand refugees. Some

  begged for food. Others dealt drugs. Some smoked water pipes, while oth-

  ers drank away their woes. Old men talked politics. Old women gossiped.

  Young boys chased each other, while teenage girls roamed in packs, whis-

  pering and giggling and wishing the boys were chasing them. Anything

  that passed the interminable hours of isolation and despair was fair game,

  it seemed, and the cries of unwanted and unexpected babies—more and

  more each month—filled the night.

  Bennett elbowed his way through the crowds, finally pushing free and

  spotting the camp’s primary care clinic, not far from the front gate, heavily

  armed by U.N. peacekeeping forces in their distinctive blue helmets. His

  pulse was racing. The muscles in his arms were burning. His legs were

  ready to give way. But he pressed on for Erin’s sake, racing across an empty

  helicopter landing pad and bursting in the front door.

  “Help, quick, I need a doctor.”

  The senior nurse on duty came over and began asking him questions

  in Arabic.

  “English,” he insisted. “Do you speak English?”

  Apparently not. She kept asking him questions he didn’t understand,

  insisting on information he couldn’t give.

  Bennett looked to the right and then to the left. He called out for

  anyone who spoke English. But no one responded. His panic intensified.

  Erin’s olive skin was rapidly turning gray and clammy, and he had no idea

  what else to do.

  Suddenly, a young woman appeared through a side doorway.

  “What seems to be the trouble, sir?” she asked with a slight accent that

  might have been British but could very well have been Australian.

  “I don’t know,” Bennett conceded, his voice catching. “We were just

  getting ready for bed when she started vomiting, over and over again.

  She couldn’t stop. Eventually she started dry heaving, and then she just

  collapsed.”

  D E A D H E A T . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

  “What did she have for dinner?” the nurse asked.

  “Nothing—maybe a few crackers,” he replied. “She hasn’t had much

  of an appetite for the last week or so.”

  “She’s burning up,” the nurse said, feeling Erin’s forehead and sticking

  a digital thermometer in her ear. “One hundred five,” she said a moment

  later.

  Jon gasped. It was so high. Too high. And it was spiking so quickly.

  He didn’t remember her having a fever when this had begun. Where was

  all this coming from? What was happening? And why?

  7:42 P.M. EST-CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  It had been twenty excruciating minutes.

  But the secure call he'd been waiting for finally came. Tracker checked the ID. Sure

  enough, it was the senior watch commander in the ops center.

  He picked up on the first ring. "Tracker, go."

  "Umberto Milano is dead, sir," the commander confirmed. "Delta just made a positive ID."

  "They're sure?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "And they got off scene in time?"

  "It was close, but yes, sir, they made a clean exit."

  Tracker knew he should be ecstatic. But there was something else. He could hear it in the commander's voice, and twenty-three years in the clandestine services told him what was coming next would ruin his night.

  "What else?" he asked reluctantly. "What's wrong?"

  "Well, sir, we may have a situation."

  "Talk to me."

  "Well, sir, the Delta teams were able to grab Milano's cell phone, but it was fried.

  They found his laptop, too. It was badly damaged, and most of the data they have been

  able to recover is encrypted. It's going to take some time to sort out."

  "Cut to the chase, Commander," Tracker demanded, his patience wearing thin. "What are you saying?"

  "Sir, the tech team was able to recover the last two e-mails Milano sent, and they're troubling, sir."

  "How so?"

  "One contains detailed maps of Los Angeles—streets, subway lines, sewage and

  electrical facilities, and so forth. The second e-mail contains detailed schematics for Staples Center."

  Tracker's stomach tightened. "The convention center?"

  "Yes, sir," the watch commander confirmed. "I don't know where they would have gotten it. It's not available online. We checked. They had to have gotten it from the office of the architects who designed the place, or from a city office."

  "When were they sent, Commander?" Tracker asked, racing to process what he had just learned.

  "Yesterday, sir."

  "To whom?"

  "We're not sure yet, sir. The tech team's still working on that."

  "Find out fast and call me back," Tracker ordered.

  "Will do, sir."

  Tracker hung up the phone, swiveled his chair, and turned to look out his seventh-floor windows at the woods of the Virginia countryside. Was he hearing this right? The

  evidence was circumstantial but terrifying. Air Force One was en route to Los Angeles International Airport. By now, it was probably on final approach. Once on the ground, the Secret Service motorcade would take MacPherson directly to Staples Center. Twenty

  thousand delegates were standing by for the kickoff of the Republican National

  Convention. The president of the Unit
ed States was about to address his party for the last time before handing over the platform to the man he hoped would succeed him.

  Was the Legion planning an attack? an assassination? Was it coming tonight?

  He had been working with the Secret Service, FBI, Homeland Security, and local and

  state law enforcement agencies for months to ensure the safety of both the Republican

  and Democratic conventions. At this point, he considered Staples Center impenetrable.

  Even in the highly unlikely scenario that a terrorist or team of terrorists actually did get inside the building, there was absolutely no way to smuggle weapons in. Pre-positioning weapons inside the convention center or somewhere on the grounds was out of the question as well. Every square inch had been checked and double-checked by the best security teams on the planet. But still . . .

  What if it was an inside job? It had happened before during the MacPherson

  administration, hadn't it? That was what eventually forced Jack Mitchell, his

  predecessor, to step down as DCI, wasn't it?

  Al-Nakbah had been able to penetrate the Treasury Department and the Secret Service

  six years earlier and nearly assassinated MacPherson twice. Not long after—and maybe

  before—the Legion had penetrated the CIA and somehow turned Indira Rajiv, one of the

  Agency's top Middle East analysts, into one of the most damaging traitors in the history of the Agency. Wasn't anything possible at this point?

  The Republican National Convention, of course, was the ideal target. Especially

  tonight. The eyes of the world would be riveted on the president's prime-time address. By all media reports, this was not going to be an ordinary campaign stump speech by a lame-duck president. Leaks from "senior White House sources" suggested MacPherson was going to make major news, though no one was sure what it might be.

  European leaders were urging the president to cut off U.S. aid for Israel if Prime

  Minister David Doron continued to insist upon constructing the new Jewish Temple in

  Jerusalem, now rapidly nearing completion. Editorials in several leading American

  newspapers were urging the same course of action, and there were rumors MacPherson was

  growing impatient with Doron. Might MacPherson throw down the gauntlet with Israel

  tonight?

  Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, were pushing MacPherson to back a

  sweeping new Middle East peace plan being crafted by U.N. Secretary-General Salvador

  Lucente. The central element of Lucente's proposal involved the withdrawal of U.S.

  military forces from the Middle East, particularly from the oil-rich Persian Gulf area.

  These would be replaced by U.N. peacekeeping forces contributed from every corner of

  the globe. Secretary of State Marsha Kirkpatrick was rumored to be sympathetic to such an

  approach. Was the president going to announce a "phased redeployment" of U.S. forces tonight?

  If that wasn't enough, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that in light of the unification of Europe into the European Union centered in Brussels and the fact that

  virtually the entire Middle East had recently united its government in Babylon as the

  United States of Eurasia, several senior MacPherson administration Cabinet officials were urging the president to call for the political, economic, and military unification of North, Central, and South America into a "United States of the Americas."

  What's more, the treasury secretary had reportedly had lunch with the president in June, urging him to embrace a single regional currency known as the "Amero" as a replacement for the traditional American dollar. One senior administration official who asked not to be named told the Journal that every government in the Organization of American States—with the exception of Cuba and Venezuela—was quietly backing such a political and economic

  unification, phased in over the next decade or so.

  "The only way the U.S. can compete and succeed in the twenty- first century is to

  create a trade bloc comparable in size and muscle to the emerging economic behemoth

  in Brussels and the emerging oil superpower in Babylon," one high-ranking U.S. official told the Journal. "Will it be controversial here at home? Absolutely. But we have no other choice."

  Controversial didn't even begin to describe it. Explosive was more like it. Such a proposal threatened to rip apart the GOP. Several prominent social conservative leaders worried openly about the loss of U.S. sovereignty and a never-ending flood of new immigrants from south of the border, even though many fiscal conservatives loved the idea of expanding free trade and enhancing economic efficiencies.

  None of these ideas or the varied reactions to them was the point, however. The point

  was that given how close the race for the White House was, and how much heat had been

  generated by various rumors swirling in the press, interest in the president's speech that night was running high, making an already "high value" target that much more tempting. The Los Angeles Times estimated eighty to ninety million Americans would tune in to hear the president's speech, along with as many as a billion people around the globe. No one had to tell the newly appointed director of central intelligence just how devastating an attack on the Republican National Convention would be on a fragile American psyche, or

  on the

  U.S. and global economy, still recovering from last year's so-called Day of Devastation and oil prices that remained well over $300 a barrel.

  Tracker picked up the phone on his desk and hit speed dial.

  "Get me Air Force One," he told his chief of staff. "Now."

  2:51 A.M.-A REFUGEE CAMP IN NORTHERN JORDAN

  The nurse was now yelling something in Arabic.

  Suddenly two more nurses and an orderly rushed to Erin's side and whisked her into an

  examining room. Bennett tried to follow them but they refused him entry. They insisted he remain outside, then shut the door in his face. A moment later, he watched two doctors race down the hallway and into the examining room, and for a split second he was able to catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of the feverish activity inside—the needles, the monitors, the battery of tests—before the door slammed shut again.

  He had done all he could, Bennett kept telling himself. He had gotten his wife to the

  clinic. He had gotten her into the care of doctors with years of trauma experience. But was it going to be enough? It had to be. The alternative was unthinkable. Still, as hard as he tried to console himself, as desperately as he tried to convince himself that everything was

  going to be fine, the bitter truth was that he had no idea, and he hated this feeling of powerlessness that was intensifying by the minute.

  Bennett stared at the closed door for a moment. He had never felt so scared in his life.

  Not in Eli Mordechai's house in Jerusalem the night he'd been shot by terrorists. Not in Gaza the day his convoy had been attacked by radical jihadists. Not in Moscow during the coup or even on the day of the firestorm. Those were different. Then, he'd feared for his own life.

  Now he feared for hers, and feared what he'd become without her.

  No one had ever loved him like Erin did. Nor had he ever loved a woman so deeply, so

  completely. He loved the sound of her voice and the way she laughed at his jokes. He loved the touch of her hand on his face and the way the light glistened off the diamond he'd

  given her the night he'd proposed.

  When he was in a crowd—unloading supplies off the U.N. relief trucks before dawn

  or feeding refugees in the mess tent morning, noon, and night or handing out toys to the children on various holidays—his eyes always seemed to be searching for hers. He loved to watch her serving others, caring for others with a love that welled up from somewhere so deep within her soul. He loved the delight she had when she caught him looking her way.

&nb
sp; And he loved how she could sense the longing in his eyes and how, as soon as she could, as soon as her task was complete, she would work her way back through the crowd to be with him, knowing that he simply couldn't be apart from her for too long without being

  overcome with a sadness he couldn't quite explain.

  When she was away from his side for more than a few hours, he physically ached for her

  in a way that would have embarrassed him to tell anyone but her, and sometimes even her.

  It felt odd to need someone so intensely. Was that normal? Did other men feel this way about their wives? When they were together—private and alone—the world lost all meaning. All he wanted to do was play with her chestnut brown hair and kiss those soft

  lips and gaze into those dazzling green eyes until their souls sparked and sizzled, and their desire turned to hunger, and their hunger turned to passion, and their passion turned to heat, and they could finally melt again into one and drift away for hours, peaceful and secure.

  To Bennett, it still defied all reason that God in His mercy had created him for her and her for him before the foundations of the world. Some of his friends didn't believe that.

  Bennett himself hadn't always. Not that long ago, he hadn't even been sure if there was a God. But Erin's love was living proof of the existence of God. Of this he had no doubt. She was the miracle God had used to open his eyes to the presence of a higher love and bigger plan than he had ever dreamed possible. He only wished he'd met her sooner, or that he'd allowed himself, at the very least, to fall in love with her sooner, faster, deeper.

  How blind he had been—how blind and how stupid. Why hadn't he asked her out

  when they'd first met? Why hadn't he insisted they elope immediately? How many days had he wasted alone? How many nights had he needlessly surrendered to cold sheets

  and a lonely heart?

  In all his life, he had never met anyone like Erin. He found himself intoxicated by her passion for Christ and her compassion for others. She didn't care about money or fame or power (Bennett's "triune god," he had joked back in the days he'd worked on Wall Street). She was constantly giving her time for those who needed her most, to a fault

  even. Since arriving at the camp, she'd worked twelve-to-fourteen-hour days— sometimes

  longer—with minimal breaks and had taken only one weekend off. She always got up