During his thirty years in Washington, he’d worked at Treasury, in the Pentagon, and for the past ten years at Division. Everyone knew that Frank Connor was going to die with his boots on. Connor knew it, too, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“All right, then,” he said. “What’s that they say about lemons and lemonade? Let’s see what we can make out of this fiasco.”
“Do let’s,” said Erskine, with exaggerated brio.
“Take a look at Rashid’s pal. Recognize him?”
Connor sat at his government-issue desk staring at the image of Prince Rashid’s associate filling his computer screen.
“Never seen him,” said Erskine. “What do you think? Distant cousin? A warlord over from Afghanistan?”
“Too spiffed up. This one’s got some class.”
“One of his Wahabi pals from Riyadh?”
“Why would he need Rashid to do his shopping for him? Plenty of fundamentalist nut jobs can do the job right there. Besides, if he were a Saudi, our assets would’ve pinpointed him by now. With all the eyes and ears we have on payroll in the royal palace, we’d know his name, blood type, and favorite scotch.”
“A friend of Balfour’s?” suggested Erskine.
Connor dismissed the suggestion with a snort. “He’s with Rashid all the way. Did you see the way the prince kowtowed to the guy? He respected him. Whoever our new friend is, he’s a mover and a shaker. He’s either done something to impress Rashid, in which case we should have a trace of him on our books, or he’s going to, in which case we may be in deep shit. Get a still blown up and send it over to tech services for cleaning up. When it’s finished, pass it over to Langley, MI6, and our friends in Jerusalem. Maybe they can put a name to a face.”
“Right away.” Erskine jotted the notes on a digital assistant, then slipped the device into his jacket. He walked to the door, but instead of leaving, he checked that it was properly closed, then crossed the office and perched himself on the corner of Connor’s desk. “You know what really concerns me, Frank?”
Connor leaned back in his chair. “What’s that?”
“The weapon Balfour mentioned finding.”
“That? Probably a five-hundred-pounder we were sending to the mujahideen way back when.”
Erskine narrowed his eyes and shook his head, having none of it. “I don’t think he’d ask Emma if she had a direct line to Igor Ivanov if it were a conventional munition. Mind taking another look at the feed?”
Connor restarted the digital recording, watching closely as Balfour handed Emma the picture of the bomb. The images were so crisp that Connor wanted to reach out and kiss her for framing the photograph so perfectly. Erskine rose from his chair and approached the fifty-inch screen. “What if it isn’t just a five-hundred-pounder?”
Connor put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “What are you trying to say?”
“What if it’s something bigger?”
“Like what? A bunker buster?”
“I don’t mean bigger in size,” said Erskine menacingly.
Connor leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. “You’re out of your mind,” he said. “We’d have known.”
Erskine crossed his arms and looked at Connor over the top of his tortoiseshell glasses. “Would we?”
11
It was past midnight when Frank Connor returned to his town house on Prospect Street in Georgetown. Mounting the stairs, he paused at the front door long enough to punch in the alarm code and watch the pinlight turn from red to green. Despite the alarm and the two-man security team parked somewhere up the street to keep watch on him, he had few illusions about his safety. He’d been in the business long enough to forget more enemies than he could remember. If someone wanted him dead, he would die without seeing his assailant.
Safety was one thing. Security another.
Instead of unlocking the door and stepping inside, he put his fingers to the brick just below the alarm and slid it to the right, revealing a second numeric touch pad. This was his own alarm, a motion detection system set to register any activity inside the home and notify him privately. He was pleased to see that the light burned amber. All clear. It wasn’t his life he was worried about so much as the information inside his home.
He tapped in his six-digit code-his mother’s birthday-and then thumbed the brick back into position. With a muted click, the door opened automatically. Connor stepped inside and set down his briefcase in the vestibule. A single lamp burned in the living room, casting light on a chintz couch and an antique Quaker chair. The house was decorated in traditional bachelor style, which meant there was really no style at all. Still, he was careful to follow the dictates required of a ranking official who’d maxed out on the Special Executive Service pay scale long ago. He had an oak dining set and fine Meissen china. He had a mahogany secretary and prints of old U.S. sailing ships. There were no photos of friends or family anywhere in the house. He had none that he cared about. The only piece of furniture he gave a hoot about was his old leather recliner, dating from his days as a law student at the University of Michigan.
Connor was a man of habit. As always, he walked to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk, turning the lights on and off to mark his progress through the house. Next he went to his second-floor den, sat down in his recliner, and made himself watch one of the late-night television hosts’ monologue. Ten excruciating minutes passed before he rose and walked up the last flight of stairs to his bedroom. He drew the curtains, changed into his pajamas, then lay on his bed, leafing through an issue of Foreign Affairs, not seeing a single word.
In his mind, a single phrase played over and over. Someone is watching.
At twelve-forty he turned off the lights. Frank Connor’s official day was over.
Five minutes later, he threw off the covers, lumbered out of bed, and walked through the bathroom and into a musty back closet reserved for discarded clothing. Pushing aside a few moth-eaten blazers, he set his shoulder against the wall and pushed. The wall spun on a gimbal to reveal a comfortable study beyond, outfitted with green carpeting, a sturdy desk, and a large captain’s chair. The room had come with the house, courtesy of its original owners, abolitionists who had helped slaves escape on the Underground Railroad. (There was a secret stairwell, too, leading to a garden shed on an adjacent property. He was not the first occupant interested in escaping from prying eyes.) The air inside was cool and smelled of lemon. He pushed the wall back into place and pressed a button that secured the door with a sixteen-inch titanium rod. Safe in his private office, Connor sighed. He could finally go to work.
He sat down and logged onto Intelnet, his agency’s secure server. His first order of business was to access his mailbox. He was pleased to note that the Strategic Air Command had finished cleaning up the picture of the American munition that Lord Balfour had shown to Emma. Computer processing had sharpened the focus tenfold, and as he gazed at the weapon he could make out the rivets on its steel skin.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispered.
Peter Erskine was right: it was no five-hundred-pound conventional bomb. Not by a long shot. An attached simulation showed what the weapon would look like when freed from the snow. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of military technology would recognize it as a cruise missile. SAC had labeled the weapon an AGM-86.
Connor had more than a rudimentary knowledge of military technology. Before joining Division, he’d worked as a procurement officer for the Defense Department and spent much of his time with companies like General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Lockheed. He knew all about a cruise missile’s specs. He knew that it could fly close to the speed of sound with a range of over a thousand miles. He knew it could be launched from a ship or dropped from a plane, and that either way it could hit a target the size of a Volkswagen Beetle with 98 percent accuracy. He knew that it could carry a conventional warhead containing high explosives or a nuclear warhead with a yield of up to 150 kilotons, ten times the size of the bomb that fell on Hiroshima.