Once inside, Chopra winced at the booming and shouting coming from an upstairs bedroom. He wasn’t sure if they called it rap or hip-hop or had invented some new term, but the sounds were headache-producing, the language unabashed.
They moved into the kitchen area, where seated around the table were two men and a woman, again all of them middle-aged and familiar to Chopra. The leaner man and the woman were private tutors, and the other, more stocky man was one of the family’s personal bodyguards. Chopra had forgotten his name but remembered that he’d retired from the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation.
He greeted them, but they were, in a word, cold, barely glancing up from their toast and cereal, which smelled wonderful since all he’d had was bitter airport coffee.
“I’m sorry,” said Southland. “We don’t quite agree with what’s happening here.”
“Why is that?” asked Chopra.
“Because he’s not ready for such responsibility,” said the woman.
Chopra glanced at her emphatically. “He’s sixteen. We all know the story of Sheikh Maktoum bin Buti.”
Southland snorted. “We’re living in much different times.”
“History repeats itself,” said Chopra. “He, too, will rise back to power.”
“Maktoum bin Buti was very young, yes, but he was courageous. Hussein is a product of the computer age, bloated with information and blinded by his own desires for stimulus and pleasure.”
This eloquent argument had come from the female teacher, and her surname finally came to Chopra: Werner. Mrs. Werner, a British college professor who’d been swept up out of graduate school to work exclusively with Hussein and his sisters.
“I didn’t come to debate this,” said Chopra. “I need to speak with him. I need to remind him of who he is and what I’ve been protecting for all these years.”
“You’re an idealist, Chopra,” Werner said, staring up at him over the rim of her glasses. “And I hope you’ve braced yourself for disappointment.”
“You’re making him out to be a monster. He’s a sixteen-year-old boy.”
The volume on the stereo upstairs suddenly spiked, and Southland lifted his voice like an irate father. “Hussein, that is much too loud!”
The volume increased further.
After a deep breath, Chopra headed for the staircase. He wound his way up to the first landing, and the music became so loud that he thought his eyes would begin to tear. He found the nearest bedroom door at the top and gave a loud knock.
No answer. He knocked again, much more loudly, and when the door swung open, Chopra took one look and remained there, aghast…
The Snow Maiden had just finished launching her own surveillance drone, which separated into four distinct modules, each sensor no larger than her thumb and attaching itself to the house. She’d just finished listening to Chopra speak to the boy’s staff, and she decided that she would move soon to catch them all in one place, when they were most vulnerable.
She was crouched behind Southland’s car as the man came outside to fetch the newspaper.
She took a deep breath and reached out with all of her senses.
If someone had been electronically monitoring her heart rate and respiration, the numbers would’ve barely risen. By the time she’d joined the GRU, she’d stopped counting the number of people she had killed. If you asked her, “Do you remember that night in Cairo when you had to take out that man just before he got in the cab?” she would squint into that memory. The kills had become routine — an ugly word when it came to death — but she hoped they’d remain that way. Without emotion or guilt to cloud her judgment or delay her performance, she could operate efficiently, robotically even. No drama — just the elimination of obstacles.
She got to work.
The neighbors would be heading out soon, and she scanned the doorways before acting.
Clear.
After a barely appreciable thump, Southland collapsed from a perfectly timed and executed head shot. She dragged his body behind the car and left it there, out of sight from the street or adjacent doorways. She fetched the newspaper and held it up in front of her face as she entered the side door.
“What the hell are they reporting on now?” came a man’s voice. Ah, yes, the bodyguard.
She lowered the paper, and in its place came her suppressed pistol. The bodyguard swallowed her first round. The teachers met her entrance with wide eyes and open mouths, as though they were hungry, too. She shrugged. Her gaze lifted to the ceiling. Indeed, the boy’s music helped muffle any sign of commotion.
Two more shots. The male teacher snapped back, then fell forward into his bowl of cereal. The other fell sideways off her chair. The Snow Maiden neared the table and snatched up a piece of the woman’s toast. Peach jam. Yummy.
Her phone vibrated. She checked the screen: a message from Patti. You’d better move. You’ve got trouble.
The missile struck the port-side engine, and the explosion sent the Sphinx banking hard and losing altitude. As the others swore and screamed, Brent thought, Well, all that worrying over my career was a waste of time. And the engineers who designed this contraption probably haven’t addressed the old autorotation issue that I’d been hearing about, so we’re dead.
But then the aircraft leveled off and the pilot got on the horn to say he had control.
That was the only good news.
In a voice tense and breathless he added that they were still coming down hard and fast and losing hydraulic fluid. Belly flopping like a five-hundred-pound man into an inflatable pool might be the best that he could do.
Brent checked one of the windows, a new addition to the Sphinx, and noted their angle of descent and the farmers’ fields splayed out before them. A pair of fighter jets raced by before he could identify them. He wanted to ask the pilot if he had any more information, but thought better of it. Let the guy focus on landing.
“Who’s praying with me?” cried Heston. “I’m not ready to meet Jesus, and I say we tell him that!”
“Get in crash positions,” ordered Brent. “Remember your training.”
As he listened to Heston’s prayer and leaned forward to place his head between his legs to, of course, kiss his butt good-bye, the Sphinx turned again, as though riding on broken rails like an old mining car. The shuddering began at the back of the aircraft and worked its way forward, as though a fault line were opening in the steel deck.
The pilot shouted something, his voice now burred by frustration. Brent strained to hear him, but the intercom cut off into static as the stench of jet fuel began filtering into the cabin. Oh, that was not good.
“Masks on!” Brent shouted above the din.
They fished out the O2 masks from their packs and slid them over their faces. These were not attached to the Sphinx but self-contained and man-portable units that Brent always carried when he flew the not-so-friendly skies. The oxygen flow came immediately and cleared the stench of fuel. Brent dug his fingers into his palms and kept seeing fireballs — a Corvette exploding, nuclear mushroom clouds rising, as Dennison’s voice came in a whisper, “It’s over. You’re finished.”
The Sphinx dropped as though hitting another air pocket, and the straps dug into Brent’s shoulders. His stomach now greeted his ears. The engines shifted pitch, whining now like lawn mowers burning pure alcohol. A sudden clunk from the deck indicated that the pilot was lowering the gear, but a redundant clunking alarmed Brent. He remembered that hydraulic leak. He chanced a quick look up at the window. The port engine was on fire, trailing smoke, but the drone suggested the rotor was still functional.
It would be fitting, Brent thought, if he died in a ball of flames as Villanueva had. His death would be the other bookend. Maybe that was his fate, and he was just walking toward the open door.