“You aren’t going anywhere, Nabi Bakhsh,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” he replied.
She swung the knife around and pushed it into the soft tissue just behind his chin. The blade was slanted toward the back of his head. The steel went through flesh, tongue, soft palate, and sinus cavity. Blood washed her wrist; and air, sucked through the wound, caused it to bubble. He gurgled down air as he reached for her hand, tried to pull the knife away. But she was pushing him back, twisting as she did, ripping a cavity at the base of his brain. His arms went limp, and he hung there on the knife, deadweight increasing by the moment.
She drew her arm back and let him fall.
“You will not be taking the throne from my father,” she said defiantly.
The princess became aware of her informants moving around her in a wide circle. They were coming toward the body, not away from it. One of them, the woman, was placing her saddlebags on the floor. The other, a man, came over and gently, quietly, took the knife from her hand.
“You have done well,” the man told her.
“Thank you.”
“As we discussed, all that remains is to make sure the moat cannot be crossed again,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
The man turned her toward the closet to her left, beside the window. The woman opened the accordion door. There was a weapon inside, nearly as long as the other woman was tall. It was a narrow tube with a trigger, a sighting device, and a sleek, flattened arrowhead on the upright end.
“You know the target, where it is,” the man said. “We’ve shown it to you.”
“I remember.”
He set a cell phone on the table. He held her hand, raised it so she could see the bracelet with the marble. “You will wait here until the phone rings. That will let you know it is time. Then you know what to do?”
“Take that rocket launcher, go to the roof, and make certain the moat cannot be crossed.”
The man smiled. “And when you are finished?”
“I will come back here, locate the highest point, and keep a lookout for my father.”
The smile vanished. He looked at the other woman in the room. She nodded, cocked her head to the door. “Why don’t you sit beside the phone and wait for it to ring?”
“All right.”
The woman grabbed keys and her shoulder bag from the table and took a final look around. The man waited for her at the door.
They left without a word.
Drs. Ayesha Gillani and Emile Samson took the elevator to the lobby and walked to the parking garage. While Samson restored the spark plugs, Gillani got behind the wheel of the old BMW. Once they had pulled onto West Street, a police officer helped them cut across the tunnel-bound traffic to get to the virtually empty uptown lane. She swung west toward the World Financial Center and the marina. She pulled as far onto Rector Place as the cul-de-sac would allow, and then Samson went to the trunk.
He took the dolly from the trunk and placed the crate on it. Then he yanked a canvas blanket from underneath and threw it over. The box said TRASK INDUSTRIES. That was not something they wanted a cop to notice. Not that any would be here, on the esplanade that led to the marina. The people who lived in adjoining Battery Park City-a complex that had been built on landfill pulled from the original construction of the World Trade Center-were already home, very few taking advantage of the beautiful day to jog or fish along the river.
Hunt had arrived there shortly before the two doctors. He had arrived in an FBI first responder counterterrorism launch, which was tied to an iron fence pole at the mouth of the marina. The New York field office kept one at the NYPD Harbor Unit marina at Governors Island, off the tip of Manhattan. Hunt had hitched a ride with the East River Patrol Division earlier that morning and had moved the launch to a berth at the South Street Seaport. It was just a short jog from the Brooklyn Bridge.
He was standing on the deck of a larger vessel, a sky-blue, twenty-eight-foot runabout with an extended triple cockpit. A canvas top with detachable aluminum poles covered the open area behind the seats. He was wearing a black FBI Windbreaker. He handed two more to the others.
“You’re late,” he said with annoyance.
“She was late,” Gillani replied. “You can’t program every minute with the time we had available.”
“Did she take care of the boy?”
“Her cousin? Yes,” the scientist replied.
There was no joy in her eyes, no satisfaction in her voice. It was a task that had to be done; that was all. Like this one.
Hunt hurried onto the concrete walkway and helped Samson with the crate.
“Just leave this,” Hunt said, knocking the dolly out from under it as he picked up one end of the crate. The men carried it onto the runabout, laying it in the open area behind the three forward seats. Hunt picked up a crowbar.
“The key’s in the ignition,” the AD told Samson. “Get us out of here.”
Samson slid behind the wheel, while Hunt pried open the crate. The pine lid came away easily, revealing a steel container inside. There was a keypad on top of it. Hunt had memorized the code Trask had given him, inputted it, and the lid popped open.
The codes for this container and the other had cost five million dollars each. That was what Trask had to pay the inside man at his company. For the same price he threw in turning off the GPS signal built into the container. It was a big price, but then only a handful of Trask’s eleven thousand employees had access to that kind of information. And he found one who had kids in college and a house near foreclosure.
The mercs who took out the Pakistanis in Quebec were a bargain compared to that, he thought. They were just a million each.
Hunt removed the launcher. The 15-pound tube was assembled, save for the placement of the nuclear RPG. That was in a separate box with a thumbprint code. Hunt put on a latex glove with the print from Brigadier General Gilbert. The AD had lifted it from a beer bottle Trask had collected during a post-think-tank cookout in Atlanta.
The smaller steel box snapped open. Hunt removed the silver projectile from its formfitting polyurethane bed. The device was 13 inches long, 7 inches of which contained the warhead and fit snuggly against the barrel of the launcher. The maximum range of the projectile was 3,000 feet, almost twice the reach of a normal rocket-propelled grenade. The added distance had been necessary, if the shooter was going to be evacuated before the radioactive cloud from the explosion reached him. In their case, they would be racing up the Hudson when he fired, already well past the target. The winds there blew primarily to the south. That was a key part of their planning.
The major cities within 50 miles-New York; Newark, New Jersey; Stamford, Connecticut; and Bridgeport, Connecticut-would not be so lucky. They were all in the radius of the prevailing winds and the radiation. Not just from the RPG blast, but from the target.
Hunt laid the assembled weapon beside the crate. He sat in the middle seat of the three, watched the thinning water traffic as the boat sped north, past Chelsea, past Midtown on the right, past the New Jersey Palisades on the left. The air felt good. He didn’t realize how much he had been perspiring until the cool wind chilled his chest, his arms, his face.
He looked at his watch. It was time to call the cell phone, put the first part of the operation into action. He drew his phone from his inside blazer pocket and handed it to Samson. All the months of planning were about to come together, seamlessly. And then the second part of the greater mission could begin.
The phone on the table beeped. Yasmin, sitting calmly beside it, answered.
“Yes?”
“It’s time,” Emile Samson told her.
“I know.” She hung up. Yasmin took a Glock from the top shelf of the closet, then picked up the rocket launcher. There were two grips on the underside; she grabbed the forward one and went to the door. There was something familiar in the air. A hint of fragrance she recognized. Where was she? Where had she been? Beside the door, arranged neatly in a vase, were chrysanthemum flowers. Why do I care? Why do I want them? Suddenly she was back in Damascus. There was a man; he was reaching out to her. She knew him and wanted to reach back. She extended her arm toward the flowers and caught a glimpse of her marble bracelet, of her world. It was in trouble. Turning to open the door, she glanced at her cousin’s body before leaving.