Lucy Jarrett sank to her knees, her shoulders wracked with sobs. The brothers from Wyoming worked to free themselves from the restraints while other climbers fell back to the gravel, blinking in amazement that they’d survived. Alberto Moretti rubbed a trembling hand across the stubble on his face. His mouth hung open as he stared at Quinn.
“You are not from Morocco, signore,” he whispered.
Quinn pulled his hands loose from the zip tie. “Yes,” he said. “I am not.”
Jacques Thibodaux trotted into camp a moment later. The massive Marine carried the desert-tan FN SCAR rifle in one hand and a small black satellite phone in the other. He looked sideways at Quinn. “Are you whole, Chair Force?” he asked, his Cajun accent palpable in even a few words.
Quinn tossed the zip tie on the ground and rubbed his wrists to get back the circulation. “I’m good.”
Thibodaux whistled under his breath, looking at the body count. “I’d have sore feet if I kicked as much ass as you.”
Quinn ducked into the cook tent to retrieve a small backpack, which he slung over his shoulders. He eyed the diminishing dot that was Abu Khalifa.
Thibodaux fished a black patch from the pocket of his pants. “Glad that’s over,” he said. “I was gettin’ tired of pretending to see out of my bad eye.” Broad shoulders and muscular arms filled a navy-blue commando sweater. Close-cropped hair and an impossibly square jaw gave no doubt that he was a military man. The black patch only added to the intensity of the gaze from his good eye.
“Miiiitzica!” Moretti gasped in the Sicilian equivalent of pleeease. All this new information, fresh on the heels of nearly being murdered, had knocked the man for a loop. “And you are not from Belgium?”
Thibodaux gave the astonished Italian a shrug. “I ain’t never even been there, cher,” he said. “Shit!” The Cajun gave a sheepish grin and passed the satellite phone to Quinn. “I about forgot. The boss wants to talk to you.”
Quinn took the phone, looking at the screen while he adjusted the tilt of the antenna to get a better signal. A cold wind from the glacier blew against his face.
“Hello?”
“News?” Winfield Palmer asked. The national security advisor to the former president was not the sort of man to exchange pleasantries. Driven to find those responsible for the assassination of his friend and former boss, he had no time for anything but information that moved the investigation forward. The fact that he was in hiding from the current administration — and harboring the director of the CIA, who was also a fugitive — only added to his curt demeanor. The simple stress of knowing that you only had a few moments, even on a secure line, before the NSA or some other government agency unraveled the code on your call, was enough to give lesser men a heart attack. The satellite phone functioned as a portable version of an STE or Secure Terminal Equipment, scrambling the signal with a morphing code that had to be keyed into each separate handset in order to decipher it. Speakers could use plain talk for a time, but at the end of the day it was still government encryption. Some NSA nerd would eventually find a way to hack the program if they stayed on the line too long.
Quinn’s eyes flicked from the bodies of the dead terrorists and down the valley to the fleeing survivor. “Things got a little wild here for a few minutes. We do have one Abu Khalifa in our sights, so that’s something. I’m hoping he should lead us to something more solid.”
“Let the Pakistanis worry about Khalifa,” Palmer said. “There’s been a development.”
Quinn was normally unflappable, but he perked up at that particular word, especially since it made Palmer blow off a high-value target like Abu Khalifa. Developments were never a good thing where Win Palmer was concerned. Good things didn’t develop. They fell off the radar. Situations that were likely to get Quinn killed qualified as developments.
“The boys we transferred from Gitmo are in the wind,” Palmer said, referring to the Fengs, Uyghur prisoners the new US President had turned over to Pakistan. It was just one more way the POTUS found to try to stir up a war with China, who insisted they had the moral right to try the Uyghur prisoners as terrorists for bombing a passenger train in Xinjiang Province. President Hartman Drake had been beating the war drum for months — and the escape of these terrorists was likely to push the Chinese President over the ledge.
“All three escaped?” Quinn asked.
“Just the brothers,” Palmer said. “Evidently the cousin died shortly after they arrived in Pakistan. But two of them are bad enough.”
“When was the escape?”
“Last night,” Palmer said. “From Dera Ismail Khan.”
“You’d think they’d learn,” Quinn mused, remembering the Taliban attack on the same prison in 2013. “Any idea which way they’re heading?”
“Mariposa is working on that problem for us,” Palmer said, sniffing like he had a cold. “She’ll come up with something soon.”
Quinn couldn’t help but smile at Palmer’s code name for Emiko Miyagi—Mariposa, the Spanish word for butterfly. Thibodaux had scoffed when he heard it, saying she was more like “One of those Japanese hornets-of-the-terrible-stinging-death.”
Not much over five feet tall, every inch of her was what Thibodaux called badassery and bitchitude, but Quinn respected her as the warrior that she was. Both men had learned the hard way that fighting Miyagi was like doing battle against a chainsaw.
“Roger that,” Quinn said. If there was something to be found, he knew Emiko would find it.
“Listen.” Palmer’s voice was distant, as if he were mulling over some bit of news and deciding whether or not to share it with Quinn on the phone. “There’s a good chance these guys are heading back to China. I don’t have to tell you how important it is that you find them before they wreak enough havoc to convince the Middle Kingdom it’s time to have a go at World War III…” Palmer broke into what sounded like a ragged tubercular cough.
“Are you doing okay, sir?” Quinn said. He’d never considered the idea that Winfield Palmer was subject to the ravages of disease that plagued normal human beings.
“I’m fine,” Palmer snapped, a little too quickly and sounding far from it. “Call me back when you know something. It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you found these guys before they get out of Pakistan.”
He ended the call without another word.
Quinn folded the antenna and stood for a long moment, staring at the looming black pyramid of rock at the head of the valley.
“What?” Thibodaux shrugged, palms up, waiting to hear Palmer’s news.
“Grab your pack,” Quinn said. “I’ll fill you in on the way.”
Moretti stared down the glacier, still wearing his hand on top of his head like a hat. “I must call the authorities… let them know what has happened,” he muttered. “There are dead to tend at Concordia camp.”
Quinn touched the Italian’s arm. “I need you to wait a few hours before you call anyone,” he said.
“Wait?” Moretti turned to look at him, incredulous. “That murderer has a head start. If I wait, he will slip away.”
Quinn nodded down the trail, then looked back at Moretti. “We need to talk to him. To try and find out who’s behind this attack.” He shot a glance at Thibodaux. “Once the Pakistanis have him, he’s gone.”
Lucy Jarrett looked up from where she sat slumped on the ground with her head between her knees. Tears plastered her hair against swollen cheeks. She shook her head, in a deepening daze, her eyes narrow and accusing.