One hundred fifty kilotons.
Connor sat up in his chair. He felt short of breath. A sharp pain speared his chest and he stiffened. Desperately he opened his mouth to breathe, to relieve the profound discomfort, but an immense, unyielding pressure had clamped down on his chest. His throat and lungs were paralyzed.
And then it was gone. The pressure lifted. The pain vanished. Connor sucked down a draft of air, feeling his entire body come back to him. The episode had lasted fifteen seconds.
Stress, he told himself as he stood and poured himself four fingers of Mr. Justerini and Brooks. Anyone would feel the same if he’d just gotten a glimpse of Armageddon.
One hundred fifty kilotons.
He lifted his glass and toasted a world gone to hell.
He was aware that the air force had lost nuclear weapons on a few occasions, but to the best of his knowledge it had recovered them without incident. He also knew that as a safety precaution, the air force had halted all bomber flights with armed nuclear weapons in 1968. The cruise missile in question wasn’t manufactured until the 1970s. Logic therefore dictated that whatever Balfour had found, and wanted Emma to help retrieve, was not an armed nuclear weapon.
But where was logic in explaining how that kind of weapon, either conventional or nuclear, had ended up high in the mountains of Pakistan or India in the first place?
There were two things that Frank Connor had learned during thirty years of government service: people lie, and anything is possible. He took these as the fundamental truths of his profession, and it was his ruthless exploitation of both that had fueled his climb to the directorship of Division.
Which brought him back to the present.
Somewhere there was a bomb, possibly nuclear, and somehow he had to get it.
He glanced at his wristwatch. The time was 1:23. It was an appropriate time for a mission to begin.
Connor logged off Intelnet. For a while he sat in the dark, contemplating the events of the day. Unlike Erskine, he was more concerned about Emma Ransom than about the discovery of the cruise missile tucked away high in a distant mountain range. For the moment the missile was contained. It was a threat. It posed near unimaginable danger if in fact it carried a nuclear payload, armed or otherwise. But any imminent danger was a way off.
On the other hand, Emma Ransom was either dead or faced torture and imprisonment. Either prospect pained him greatly.
Emma was special. Emma had sacrificed. Emma had given of herself, as he had given of himself.
Connor rose and crossed to the far corner of the room. With difficulty, he kneeled and pulled back a section of carpet, revealing a safe with a biometric lock. He opened it and retrieved a sturdy leather-bound volume. He needed a breath to regain his feet, and several more to make it back to his desk. Seated, he cracked the volume and turned the pages slowly, staring at the photographs affixed to each page.
Against every rule of practice, Frank Connor had assembled an album of every man and woman who had worked as an operative at Division. There were only photographs. No names. No dates. Just faces. Still, it was a fundamental breach and he knew it. He had no excuses. His heart needed none. They were his family.
He stopped at a page halfway through and looked down at the young woman with twisted auburn hair and spectral green eyes. She looked so young. Not innocent. Emma had never been innocent. But young and eager, and, by God, so willing. He had never known anyone so capable and so driven.
He closed the book and raised his eyes toward the ceiling. Something stirred inside him. Not sorrow. Certainly not guilt. He had forsaken his conscience years ago. Something stronger. A call to duty. He owed her.
Connor picked up his phone and placed a call to the Middle East. A male voice answered.
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I’ve got an assignment for you,” said Connor. “Strictly off the record.”
“Isn’t it always?”
12
It was one o’clock in the afternoon in the United Arab Emirates when the man pulled onto the shoulder of the highway from Dubai to Sharjah. He put the Land Rover into park and stared out the window. A sea of undulating dunes spread to all four corners of the horizon with nothing to differentiate one patch of earth from the next. For a final time he checked the coordinates of his handheld GPS against those he’d received two hours earlier from Frank Connor. The map indicated his position as twenty-six kilometers southwest of the Sharjah Free Trade Zone. He was in the right place.
Climbing down from the cab, the man made a circuit of the vehicle. He stopped at each tire, inserting a pen into the air valve until he’d bled fifteen pounds of pressure. Finished, he ran a sleeve across his forehead while looking in either direction for approaching vehicles. No cars were visible. Even so, he wouldn’t have been overly concerned. Tours of the desert were popular among visitors. The logo of Dubai Desert Adventures adorned the vehicle’s doors. To all passing eyes he was just one more guide. If anyone wished to look closer, the glove compartment held a valid guide’s license, his operating permit, and a log of customers dating back two years. As cover it would withstand a cursory inspection, but little beyond that. It was the best he could do on short notice.
The man slid behind the wheel and shoved the gearshift into first. The Land Rover lurched forward, the underinflated tires gripping the sand nicely. Sky filled the windscreen as the vehicle climbed a dune. The next moment the nose fell, and blue was replaced by brown as the car slid down the back side. His destination was an anonymous point in the desert thirty kilometers due west, where Emma Ransom had last been seen. Satellite imagery taken after her video feed was cut showed the heat signature of six vehicles departing from the airfield and traveling deep into the desert. Enhancement of the images identified five of the vehicles as belonging to the national police. The sixth was a Mercedes SUV and belonged to Prince Rashid.
“One of my operators is missing,” Connor had said when he’d called hours earlier. “This one is a priority. To be found at all costs.”
The man drove for an hour, his neck growing tense from the vehicle’s continual rising and falling. One kilometer from the destination, he crested a rise and braked before the Land Rover could plummet down the other side. Cautiously, he stepped out. The dune sea ended just ahead, giving way to a moonlike expanse of hard sand, rock, and scrub. With his binoculars, he scanned the landscape. Almost immediately his eye caught a patch of color where none should be. There, precisely where the satellite had last mapped Prince Rashid’s position, was a black garment impaled on a thorn bush.
Lowering his binoculars, he listened. The desert was a vacuum and sound traveled far. He heard nothing. Senses on alert, the man guided the vehicle down the last dune. Leaving the motor running, he walked to the bush and removed the garment. It was a cotton T-shirt, and he noticed at once that all of its labels had been cut out. It was a spy’s garment, and as such, verification that Rashid had brought Emma Ransom to this place. One corner of the shirt was dry and crusted, and when he ran a thumb over it, it came away the color of rust.
A few meters away, tire tracks raked the dirt. The man approached and observed a storm of footprints in a semicircle around a smoothed patch of sand. Cigarette butts littered the area. Kneeling, he ran his fingers through the sand. He came away with various rocks and pebbles and sticks. There was something else, too. A tooth. A human molar with a silver filling.