An explosion lit the sky, rattling the windows and furniture. Jonathan crouched and protected his head instinctively. Rising, he spied a large blotter on a side table. The blotter was covered with notes, but they were written in Urdu and thus incomprehensible.
He hit Enter on the computer keyboard. The monitor remained dark. Power was still out, and it seemed that the IT system did not benefit from its own auxiliary power supply. If he couldn’t find anything, he’d let Connor have a try. He slipped the blade he’d taken off his razor from his pocket and held it between his fingers. It wasn’t in fact a blade at all, but a flash drive encoded with the Remora spyware. The operating instructions were idiot-proof: insert the flash drive into a USB port for ten seconds and withdraw. Remora would copy the computer’s hard drive and send its contents via the computer’s own Ethernet connection to Division. There was only one problem. Jonathan could not find the computer’s central processing unit. Wires extending from the monitor dove behind the desk and disappeared beneath the carpet. He scanned the wall to both sides but saw nothing.
Another dead end.
More footsteps sounded in the hall. The same pairs of boots. Two men, at least. Jonathan froze, and the footsteps continued past. He breathed again.
He moved back to the desk. The top drawer was locked, but a side drawer was not. In it he found a brochure for Revy’s surgical practice, a matchbook from Dubai, pens, a calculator, and little else of interest. He tried the top drawer again, but it still didn’t budge. The desk was old enough to have a conventional lock. No doubt Mahatma Gandhi himself had signed the declaration of India’s freedom on it. He looked around for a key but found nothing. He tried a letter opener, but the blade was too wide. He trained the light across the desk. Something glimmered. It was a pair of surgical scissors. Inserting the pincers into the lock, he felt for the tumbler. This was one class Danni had forgotten. He angled the scissors up and down. Feeling resistance, he pressed harder and the tumbler fell.
Gingerly he slid the drawer open. An agenda lay on top of a raft of papers. A ribbon marked today’s date. He opened to the page and read, in English, “M. Revy-Emirates Air 12:00.” And on the next line, “Haq arrives. Prepare for transport to EPA. H18.” He turned the page. “UAE6171. 2000. PARDF Pasha.” A phone number followed with the initials M.H. He recognized the country code as Afghanistan.
He turned the page and read more details, this time about flights to Paris and onward to St. Barts. He read names and places: hotels and banks, government officials and corporate bigwigs, the entire itinerary of Balfour’s new life.
His eyes strayed, and the trained observer saw something else in the drawer. A knife. Dull and gray as a shark’s skin. He picked it up. An army issue KA-BAR, one side of the blade honed, the other serrated.
Another explosion shook the windows, and for an instant the office lit up. In that moment he spotted the computer tower behind a glass cabinet door. He returned the agenda to its place and closed the drawer just as an engine roared into the motor court. Car doors opened and closed. He looked out the window to see Balfour and Singh climbing out of the Range Rover.
“They can’t be phantoms,” Balfour was saying. “Someone is shooting at us. If it’s not Indian intelligence, it’s the ISI trying to scare me into leaving. Don’t tell me no one’s there. I want them found, do you understand?”
Jonathan rushed to the computer and, falling to a knee, ran his hand behind the unit. One USB slot remained empty. Fingering the flash drive, he struggled to slip it into the slot, but the space behind the tower was too narrow. He set the drive on the table, then leaned over and dragged the tower away from the wall.
Still kneeling, he ran a hand blindly across the table.
The flash drive was gone.
“Looking for this?”
Jonathan froze.
The voice.
It was her.
Slowly he rose from his knees and turned to face his wife. “Hello, Emma.”
58
They stood face-to-face in the dark. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Jonathan needed the time to take her in. He noticed the hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail, the windburned cheeks, the chapped lips. There was a scar on her jaw that hadn’t been there before-a laceration that had required stitches. She wore a loose-fitting black blouse and jeans, and he knew they were not her clothes. He met her eyes, and the shock of seeing her hit him like a gale-force wind. Yet there was no surge of lost love, no overwhelming desire to take her in his arms. Some time ago he had forbidden himself to consider her his wife. He loved her, no question, maybe something deeper than that. Even now, her outlaw beauty thrilled him. With no distance separating them, the sound of her breathing slow and shallow, the warm smell of sandalwood rising from her skin, he was as overwhelmed by the animal force of her personality as he had been the day he met her.
“What in God’s name are you doing here?” asked Emma, her whisper strangled with rage.
“I should ask you the same question,” said Jonathan.
Emma tossed the flash drive onto the desk. “So Connor finally got to you. He must be very proud of himself. What did he tell you?”
“That you helped Balfour bring the cruise missile’s warhead down from the mountain. That was enough.”
“That must have surprised him.”
“Why, Emma?”
“You mean Frank forgot to tell you? He betrayed me, Jonathan. He wanted to have me killed.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Then what do you know?”
“I know that you’re helping a half-crazy arms dealer deliver a nuclear warhead into the hands of a very rational, very capable terrorist who will not hesitate to use it against the United States.”
“Then you really don’t know a damn thing at all.”
“I know that Prince Rashid tortured you.”
“Is that how Frank convinced you? ‘Save your poor wife’?”
Jonathan’s hand touched hers. “Are you all right?”
“I’m alive. Only a few new scars. Practically beauty marks in our trade, darling. Now, why don’t you mind your own business?”
“You are my business.”
“I was never your business,” she flared. “It was the opposite way around. Get that through your head once and for all.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Believe what you want,” she said, as if suddenly too tired to convince him otherwise. She shifted her weight, and her expression changed. On a dime she changed from beleaguered to ice-blooded operative. “I am curious as to how he got you inside Balfour’s armed camp.”
“The Pakistani government wants Balfour out. He hired a Swiss plastic surgeon to alter his features so he can disappear after he sells the warhead.”
“And Connor swapped you in for him?”
“Something like that.”
“So now you know what it’s like to be someone else. How does it feel?”
“I don’t like it much.”
“Neither did I.” Emma dug her chin into her throat and adopted Connor’s sincere baritone. “Buck up and take one for the team, Dr. Ransom.”
“Stop it.” Jonathan grabbed Emma by the shoulders. “Why are you still here?”
“It was part of our deal. He saved my life. In return I helped him bring down the warhead, and now I’m teaching him how to live under the radar. I’ve been doing that for almost ten years. Who better?”
“Balfour’s handing over the bomb tomorrow. We can’t let that happen. Where is the exchange taking place?”
Emma smiled coldly, eyeing him from across their personal no-man’s-land. “You’re out of your depth, Jonathan.”
“You didn’t leave me much choice.”
“You could have said no.”