“In this.” Tranthan held out the small gold photo frame. “Do you remember it?”

  “I know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “I know that.” She repeated the words.

  “Give her something to help.” Robert spoke to the man at the edge of the darkness in the far corner of the room.

  “Where’s Billie?” Maggie said, suddenly agitated. “I really need to talk to Billie.”

  She winced as the chemicals flowed into her IV. Almost immediately her eyelids became visibly heavy.

  “What was the password, Maggie?”

  Suddenly, Maggie O’Donald’s face showed fear. “Where’s my buzzer?” She ran her hand down, as far as she could reach, along the bed rail, looking for the feel of the buzzer.

  “Maggie, I need you to concentrate.”

  “Okay.”

  “Was the password a word?”

  “No.”

  “Maggie, lives depend upon what is on this flash drive. The Gulf could blow up without this. We need it!”

  “The park,” she said without warning.

  “What park?”

  “The park is important.” Her face was full of confusion.

  Tranthan signaled with his hand. The figure in the dark handed him a small laptop, which he opened and turned on. Tranthan didn’t say anything. After what seemed an eternity, he connected the flash drive to the computer.

  “Maggie, help me on this.”

  The password box came up.

  “Try Battery Kemble,” she said.

  The park where they used to meet . . . Hidden deep in Washington’s northwestern corner, on a side street, the park’s small entrance was known only to the few homeowners whose houses backed up to it. Well over a hundred and fifty years ago, the steep hill that formed the far northern end of the park was a battery emplacement to protect Lincoln and the city from the advancing Confederates.

  The beep of the computer signaled a failed password.

  “Maggie, it says we only have two tries left.” Tranthan felt his anger building into recklessness. “Try harder.” He looked to the man with him. He injected her again; again, it wasn’t the morphine that Maggie would be used to.

  “I don’t know. I need to sleep.”

  “Maggie, help me on this and we’ll let you sleep.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I don’t look good.” She began to sob. “I will never look good again.”

  “Maggie, you won’t. I can’t lie. But you are a professional. Lives depend upon your being a professional. Can you do it?”

  She tried to stop the tears, but they continued to pour down her face.

  “Try BKP06,” said Maggie, her voice nearly a whisper.

  “Battery Kemble Park.” He hesitated. “Oh-six?” He paused as he thought of the number. “June?”

  “Yes.”

  “Our first meeting.”

  He punched the numbers into the password. Again, the computer refused the attempt.

  “Damn it, Maggie . . .”

  Tranthan didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally, he shook his head sadly.

  “Maggie, with what’s going on now, I may not get a chance to see you again.”

  “What?” She began to sob again.

  “We need that password.”

  Tranthan continued to look at the computer screen, seeming to ignore her.

  “Concentrate, Maggie,” he chanted softly. “Concentrate.”

  Her expression changed, becoming more distant as her voice faded. “Please get me Billie.”

  “Come on, Maggie.”

  She closed her eyes, concentrating, then mumbled something.

  Tranthan couldn’t hear what she was saying. He leaned over.

  “What?”

  She seemed to be struggling to repeat what she’d said. No sound came out. She was fading faster.

  He watched her lips, reading the words as she tried once more. There! He had it. Without trying the password, he knew with certainty that he had the correct one. He closed the computer and walked out of the room.

  Robert Tranthan made several decisions at that moment. The renegade operation to find and stop the man that caused all of this would be shut down.

  Shut down. With prejudice.

  Tranthan considered the odds. If Scott’s plan succeeded it risked exposing his link with Maggie. It risked exposing her source.

  “I think I know who it is.” He spoke the words to himself as he walked down the hall.

  And Maggie was simply too much of a risk.

  CHAPTER 36

  King Street, London

  Parker stopped at the bottom of the stairs before stepping out into the cold, wet wind. The inner pocket of the coat held the airplane tickets and visa pressed against his chest. A lower side pocket bulged with the scarf that Atwan had just given him. Parker pulled the zipper up; only a sweater cap protected his head.

  Parker glanced at his bearded, somewhat wild-looking reflection in the storefront’s glass window. God, what a sight. She would laugh at me.

  As he moved out of the doorway a double-decker bus stopped directly in front of the building. Parker stopped again, waiting for it to move on. It pulled away to reveal a man standing across the street under the cover of the overhang of the extended roofline of a government building. It was someone that he did not recognize.

  The stranger, dressed in a dark ski coat, looked not at the traffic or the pedestrians or the storefronts, but above Parker, to the second floor and the Al-Quds office.

  Parker sensed trouble. His stare met the stranger’s for a moment, but a passing lorry broke their eye contact. Once the truck cleared, the man was gone.

  Oh, shit.

  Parker wheeled around, back to the newspaper building, pulled the door open, breaking the lock as he did, and headed up the stairs two steps at a time. After the first two steps, a flash picked him up and threw him back down the stairs and through the closing glass door. The heat, plaster, and wood hit him like a shotgun blast.

  Parker reached to his face. In the stunned moment, he felt his own, unfamiliar beard, along with a new, sticky substance. As he tried to sit, his head began to swirl. Little stars flashed across his vision as a woman bent down beside him. Another man came out of nowhere and grabbed Parker under the arms and was pulling him down the sidewalk, away from the blaze. The woman’s mouth was moving, but Parker could only hear a ringing in his ears. He sensed the wet sidewalk, though, and his pants being drenched in the rain puddles.

  Slowly, the ringing started to quiet.

  “You’re bleeding.” The woman was shouting the words, looking at the top of his head.

  Parker reached up and pulled his hand away, seeing blood—his blood.

  “I’m all right.” He mumbled the words in English, then realized he needed to slip back into the Bosnian dialect. He closed his eyes momentarily. When he opened them again, he was looking at the second floor of the building, which was ablaze.

  “The people.” He pointed to the second floor.

  The man who had pulled him out of the debris was shouting the words as well.

  An ambulance technician leaned over. Parker saw him before registering the wail of sirens in the background. The technician dabbed his forehead with a large gauze bandage while another felt Parker’s legs and arms.

  “Not bad, lad.” The technician cleaned the head wound. “Anything else, George?”

  “I don’t think so. Bloody lucky he was standing where he was. One step to the left or right and he would have gotten a chest load of glass fragments.”

  “Thank you,” Parker mumbled in accented English.

  “We need to take you in.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Still, we need to take you in.”

  Sadik’s wife. The thought struck Parker harder than the explosion. If, by chance, I was the target, Zdravo and her niece could be next.

  “Check on the others. I’ll be all right here. Just let me sit here for a moment.”

  “Let’s pull him up under this doorway. I’m hearing we have badly burned victims behind the building.”

  The two techs pulled Parker to a nearby foyer, retrieved their bags, and headed to the back of the building.

  Parker watched them disappear, then rolled over on his forearms, waiting a second for the vertigo to abate, and did a push-up to his knees, finally standing up. He leaned against the doorway, trying to get his balance back. The rain drenched his face as he crossed over King Street, heading south to the tube.

  He removed the bandage and trashed it quickly.

  Good God. His head was still swimming, causing him to stop again in the doorway of a café. Parker looked back at the raging fire that was consuming what was left of the newspaper. King Street had now been blockaded by the fire trucks and police vans.

  On a nearby light pole Parker noticed for the first time a pair of security cameras covering the street. As he made his way down the street, he pulled out his PDA and checked the time. He had two minutes until the next train on the Victoria line. It was a straight shot to Walthamstow. He started to run across the tube’s entrance, past the stores, reaching into his pants pocket for the rail pass, and once through the gate ran down the escalator, running past the Londoners standing on the steps.

  The clock was ticking.

  He heard the train and felt the warm wind blow through the connecting tunnel. It was still a long walk to the train heading north, but the express would be faster than even what Scott could do. Parker ran through the walkways, down another escalator, and reached the train just as its doors started to close.

  He took a seat.

  The woman sitting across from him had a young girl, perhaps four or five, who was staring at him. Her eyes were like saucers, big and brown, looking frightened.

  Parker saw why when he glanced up at his reflection in the glass of the train’s window. Blood still streaked his face. He pulled the sweater hat off only to find a shard of glass caught in the fold. The hat was soaked from the rain, and he used it as a rag to clean up his face. He smiled at the child, who smiled back now that the blood was gone. The entire time her mother never looked up, talking intently on her cell phone.

  Parker looked at the PDA again. The train had another ten minutes until the last station. He put in the password and texted Scott.

  Explosion ws Al Q

  It didn’t take more than a second for the reply.

  We know

  Parker began typing another reply.

  Check street sec cam

  Again, the response was immediate.

  Got it

  Parker thought a moment and looked at the time again. The train was still five minutes out of the station. He thought of Zdravo and the child.

  The police officer who patrolled the station. He would be the closest source of help.

  Parker starting texting Scott again.

  Woman n child at rsk . . . gt wrd to p at W.Sta . . . he is close

  This time there was a delay. Scott was reading the text and then, Parker hoped, he was talking to his man at Scotland Yard.

  Come on, come on. The train was still two minutes out from the station. There was no text reply. Parker sent another.

  Status?

  Still no reply. Perhaps being in the tunnel had interrupted the signal.

  The train pulled in to the station. It seemed an eternity for the doors to open. Walthamstow was aboveground and open. Parker stepped through the doors as soon as they started to pull apart. The station was empty. He sprinted across to the entranceway, looking for the police officer who always stood in the corner. The policeman was missing.

  A good sign. The policeman was never missing. He must have gotten the word.

  Parker began to run. The street was just ahead. Ahead he saw an object lying across the curb and sidewalk. As he moved closer, he saw the limp shape of a body dressed in a blue shirt and dark pants. The shirt was stained in a circle of blood that went down the side to a puddle below. It was the station officer. Scott had gotten the word. Parker stopped, checked for a pulse, and looked down the one-lane street. It was empty. He could hear the sirens in the distance. Parker felt around the officer’s waist, looking for a weapon. There was none.

  He started walking down the street. It remained quiet and empty. No one was moving. He saw no one. The sirens were getting louder. He was alone. Only him and the man.

  Parker kept walking down the street, keeping a car to his back as he moved, expecting anything. Just as he got to the flat, he looked up at the window where she would sit with the baby. It was vacant. He moved up to the front door. It was ajar, opened only the width of a man’s fist, but the opening caused him to shudder.

  She would never leave that open.

  He slid the door open with his foot, staying behind the protection of the wall and staying in the alcove, just out of sight from anyone on the street. Parker paused, planning his next move. The sirens were getting closer.

  They’re on the street.

  In moments, an armed team would be charging through this doorway. He—

  The second explosion of the day ripped through the brick building around him.

  CHAPTER 37

  A village south of Quetta

  Yousef rolled off the rug just before the first break of light. The trip from Sarai Naurang had taken most of the night, with their two-vehicle convoy cutting far to the east several times to avoid Pakistani patrols. The cramped quarters of the truck were more of a problem than the lack of sleep. The cold had started to harden the muscles in his back. His knees popped and creaked as he tried to stand.

  A true soldier needs no more than two hours’ sleep. Napoleon Bonaparte. When in combat, Yousef taught himself to go days without sleep. Exhaustion was simply a frame of mind that he told his younger jihadis “allowed the stronger warrior to survive on the battlefield.” It was another weapon over the weak.

  Yousef ’s bed consisted of a prayer rug that he’d been given by his grandfather, the gardener. It came from his great-grandmother’s village in northern Iran, where craftsmen had woven such rugs for more than five hundred years. Yousef ’s oldest son would inherit the rug. It was no less a part of his family than his sons, his daughters, or his wife.

  As the first light started to break through the window of the small mud-brick house, Yousef carried his rug out into the garden, laid it out pointing to the west, and prepared for his morning prayer. The others, his guards and Umarov, joined him for the dawn ritual.

  Mecca. Just to the west of that peak.

  The wall of purple mountains to his west was rising out of the darkness.

  Yousef looked at the others as he thought of the home of his religion. An imaginary compass line pointed to Mecca from his valley. It followed a point just south of the largest peak on the western wall of rocks. He checked it once on Google Earth and was surprised to see that the computer’s extended line crossed the path he had envisioned—from the valley, west, over the tall peak, and then continued on for fifteen hundred miles to Mecca.

  They will never see it. The thought struck him as he looked at the men bent, on knees, next to him. They would never see the white pillars of Mecca or touch al-Hajar al-Aswad, the Black Stone.

  Yousef al-Qadi had traveled regularly to the city during his youth. His family drove through the desert, across much of Saudi Arabia, to the hajj every year. Yousef ’s memory as a child was the crush of people. Strange people from different lands with mixtures of languages and strange looks, most he could not understand. His stepsister would hold his hand tightly, cutting off the circulation, and scold him when he would wander off. His stepmother would yell at him at the first signs of a runny nose or cough. The crush of people carried the risk of illness, and the stepmother would always blame the child of the gardener’s daughter as the reason her other children became ill.

  But the hajj also gave him an early sense of the power of his faith. Millions would travel to Mecca, but hundreds of millions believed. Most would never be able to travel to the center and source of their religion, but still they believed. Many would give their lives because it was Allah’s will, because they believed.

  A true Muslim state. This was Yousef ’s dream for his people.

  Saudi Arabia was not the true Muslim state. Its leaders were false prophets.

  He looked up to the mountains that formed the little valley that surrounded his small apple orchard. The Americans waited on the other side of the mountain range. Those same mountains went to the south as far as he could see and, for over a thousand miles, to the north as well. The mountains to the north had been given silly Western names by the infidels: K2, Everest, and others.

  As Pakistan had torn itself away from India, it was now his mission to pull these people away from Pakistan. Yousef carried with him a small map of his dream. It had a black outline that went well beyond Afghanistan, east into the Waziristans, both north and south, and the tribal areas north of the Khyber Pass. It extended down to the south, beyond Quetta. It went west into Iran. The West had created many of the countries of this world. Certain tribes that held the power had created many. But it was the original land that he sought.

  A state that would be a harbor for true believers.

  Yousef smiled at the thought.

  Hasbun Allah wa ni’am al-wakil. He will be my guardian. The challenge will not be the Americans. They will go away. The challenge will be the tribes. Yousef knew that only a bold warrior could unite the people. It would take an evangelical fervor. It would take credibility. He had to be known. The name Yousef would be carried on the lips of both the young and the old. He would be the one.

  “How is the plan?” Umarov asked.

  Yousef looked around for a moment and then, deciding it was safe, pulled Umarov close to him, watching carefully for the others.

  “The Chicago cell is in place and is just waiting to be activated. The Canadian cell is activated. They just need the nuclear core. And our little pilot is on her way.” Yousef smiled.

  And then he laughed out loud.

  “The little girl.” Yousef spoke the words as he looked to the mountains beyond. He had seen her trying to play soccer in Danish Abad with a ball made of socks and plastic bags. He knew she was perfect after her brother had introduced her. No one had connected her to Samullah. She was driven. She would not fail. She would go to Canada. She would tell them she was there for help with her leg. She would pass through customs without question. The limp would distract. But she now she had been trained. She was a quick learner. Despite her leg, a frozen knee torn apart by a fall from a bridge in Danish Abad to the rocks below, she was a natural athlete with perfect hand-and-eye coordination. She was the perfect pilot. They never would have suspected that she could fly anything.