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Patience, Nadir, he could hear his mother whisper.

Patience, young man, and you will go far.

* * *

The morning sun was not yet visible on the Mount of Olives, the site chosen for the Israeli and newly appointed Palestinian prime ministers for the beginning of their peace talks.

Nor would it be that Friday. Storms still blackened the skies, though the forecast called for a break in the wind and rain over the next few days. Not that it mattered to Jon Bennett, his team or the two prime ministers in his care. They weren't anywhere near the real Mount of Olives. They were now half a world away from Jerusalem, in a labyrinth of caves and secret military bunkers, deep inside a mountain of Jurassic limestone, drilled at great cost by British forces trying to defend Europe from the Nazi's gathering storm.

The "Mount of Olives" was a code name handpicked by President MacPherson, and it was a name known to only a few dozen U.S. military and intelligence officers, a handful of senior White House and State Department officials, and the British prime minister and his top staff. It referred to the secure, undisclosed location of the peace talks about to begin, and every measure was being taken to prevent that location from leaking out. There were, after all, lives at stake, and there were men who would stop at nothing to destroy the lives of those now gathered in this mountain. Thus, of the few people entrusted to know the term "Mount of Olives," fewer still knew precisely to what it referred. Even Bennett and McCoy didn't know, not until they'd arrived under the cover of darkness at a place most simply called the Rock.

Towering over the entrance to the Mediterranean, the Rock of Gibraltar was three miles long and fourteen hundred feet high. The ancient world considered it one of the two Pillars of Hercules — the other being the North African Mount Hacho on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar — not to mention the very "ends of the earth." The tiny peninsula below the Rock was only six and a half square miles in size and home to less than thirty thousand people. But however one measured it physically, Gibraltar was of incalculable strategic value — the choke point between Europe and North Africa, the gateway to the Mediterranean.

Churchill's forces survived massive aerial bombardments inside the Rock's hundred-and-forty caves and underground bunkers. Eisenhower successfully directed the rescue of North Africa from these very same installations. Now the Brits and Americans maintained highly sophisticated electronic intelligence gathering facilities on the Rock, including a state-of-the-art Echelon listening station, linked by secure satellite ground stations and digitally encrypted fiber-optic pipelines run by the National Security Agency.

Gibraltar remained a source of contention between Britain and Spain as it had for nearly three centuries. The Spanish yielded control to London in the Treaty of Utrecht in July 1713, and had been moaning and complaining about the deal ever since. The dispute was a thorn in the flesh of both sides. But for the past three hundred years it had been largely political, not military in nature, so Gibraltar was now the peaceful, prosperous home to Muslims, Jews, and Christians, the homes and shops and houses of worship, not to mention Pizza Hut and Burger King franchises, increasingly ubiquitous among free and modern people the world over.

A disputed territory free from terrorism and war? What better place, thought Bennett, to seek a new peace and prosperity for the people of the Book. All they had to do now was keep it a secret.

* * *

Bennett finally got up at 5:00 a.m. local time.

Another restless, fitful night was over. He'd been up three times since going to bed at midnight, checking his e-mails and scouring the Internet for updates about his mother, the hunt for the suicide bombers on their way to the U.S., and the latest developments in the West Bank and Gaza.

The news of the reward should have encouraged him. Five million dollars? Maybe he should double it, or match it himself. He had the money. McCoy would give everything she had to have her mother or father back. He should, too.

He tried not to think about where his mother could be at the moment. He tried not to let himself think about what she could be going through. But it wasn't easy. He'd seen some horrible things in the past month, and been briefed about even worse. Bennett knew what these people were capable of, and they made Al Capone look like Mother Teresa.

The thought of his own flesh and blood in the hands of these monsters almost made him sick. But what else could he do? He couldn't let it paralyze him. Somehow he had to stay focused. His responsibilities would consume his time over the next few days and weeks and demand his full attention. The full resources of the American government were doing everything humanly possible to track her down and bring her home safely. It would do no good to micromanage every move the FBI and the DHS made. He would have to trust them. He had no other choice.

That, of course, was easier said than done. For the past thirty-six hours— ever since they'd been airlifted out of Alpha Zone by SEAL Team Eight— he'd been a wreck. Unable to sleep. Unable to keep food down. Running a slight fever. Nightmares. Flashbacks. And early signs of dehydration. The chief physician on the Reagan put him on an IV the minute he arrived, and for the next twenty-four hours he was on forced bed rest. So were Sa'id and Galishnikov, it turned out. Bennett was almost relieved to hear it — not because he wanted them to be suffering, only because it made him feel slightly less guilty at not being strong enough to have sailed through Gaza unscathed.

Physically, McCoy, Tariq, and Nazir had weathered it best. But emotionally, the loss of Ziegler, Maroq, and Hamid was almost too much. Bennett's team wasn't on bed rest, per se. But they were being encouraged to rest and read and spend some time with the chaplains onboard. What they all needed was some serious R&R, a chance to get away for a few weeks, maybe longer, and take their time recovering. But such rest was not in the cards. Not for some time to come.

Bennett looked over at the half-empty bottle of sedatives he'd been prescribed to bring down his blood pressure and help him get some badly needed rest. They weren't helping much. But he certainly couldn't take any more. He had work to do, and time was of the essence.

He couldn't believe it was already the last day of the year. In many ways it was the day for which he'd been preparing for nearly an entire decade. He finally got out of bed for the last time and went over to the large desk in the guest suite to which he'd been assigned. The room, the very one used by Eisenhower, had no windows, as it was deep inside the Rock. But it was comfortable enough, with a spacious work area, multiline phone, cable television, broadband Internet connection and a small, round conference table and four maroon leather chairs.

Sitting down before his notebook computer again, he clicked onto the Internet and scanned the headlines where he found a little good news. Operation Palestinian Freedom was proceeding apace and racking up tangible victories, bit by bit. The Pentagon was now reporting that Bethlehem, Jericho, and their surrounding towns and villages were now securely in U.S. hands. So was the Jordan River valley, a two-mile security perimeter around the outskirts of East Jerusalem, and the main thoroughfare between Jerusalem and Jericho.

A sudden chill ran through him. It was strange, in a way. Bennett had never been to Sunday school. He'd never read the Old Testament all the way through, and barely skimmed the New Testament during a college class on comparative religions. Yet somehow, just reading the names of these ancient biblical towns stirred something inside him. These were not just names of modern-day battlegrounds. They were keys to a lost world, metaphysically linked across space and time to the icons of Western civilization, men such as Abraham and Moses, Caleb and Joshua, Jesus and the disciples. These were ancient battlegrounds, where apocalyptic wars were once fought with Persia (now Iran), Babylon (now Iraq), the Assyrians (now modern-day Syria), the Egyptians, and with the Philistines of Gaza on the coastal plains of the Mediterranean. Now such cities were again front-page news.