“Expecting visitors?” I ask.

  “I am,” she says. “You’re the first.”

  “You’ve been waiting all night?”

  At the garage, she puts down her duffel, takes out a thermos, and pours coffee into two tall metal travel mugs. “Don’t be stupid, John,” she says, handing me a mug. “I figured you were near Fort Bragg, and after poor Ruiz got nailed, you had a certain number of hours to get here.”

  I don’t like being called stupid, and in any other time or place, I would make that clearly known to this CIA officer. But I want to get moving. “So here I am. Where do we go next?”

  “To see Gary Bastinelli,” she says. “Other than the two of us, he’s the last survivor of our mission. We need to talk to him before someone else gets there, though I doubt anything bad will happen to Bastinelli.”

  I do the gentlemanly thing and pick up her duffel bag. “Say again?”

  “Bastinelli is a full hard-core prepper,” she says. “Anybody trying to get into his compound without permission is going to run into a buzz saw.”

  I follow her into the neat and tidy garage, black Chevrolet Tahoe parked in the center. We put our coffee in the cupholders and the gear and the M4 in the rear seat. She gets behind the wheel and I take the passenger side and say, “Do we have permission to visit him? And how do you know this?”

  She toggles a switch on the Tahoe and the garage door lifts up. “We do have permission, and it’s my job to know things.”

  I say, “What do you know about me?”

  We go down the driveway, and she makes a right. “Don’t have the time. Sorry, John.”

  We travel less than fifty yards and we’re getting near the parked Lexus, and I’m about to ask Deacon if she learned anything else after our Zoom call when she says, “Shit.”

  I say the same thing, haul my Glock out of the holster.

  Up ahead is the Lexus on four shot-up and flat tires; the rear window is shattered, bullet rounds pockmark the metal, and I see shapes on the side of the road.

  Deacon brakes hard, and the Tahoe shudders to a halt; she throws the car into reverse and slams the accelerator. We roar back up the road in reverse, and then, in a series of quick and smooth moves, Deacon puts the gear in neutral and rotates the steering wheel.

  I grab the dashboard of the Tahoe as she expertly does an evasive J-turn and then shifts into drive and punches the accelerator. We speed away from the ambushers.

  “Impressive,” I say.

  “And our goddamn coffee is still in the cupholders,” she says.

  Chapter

  66

  Less than two hours later we’re in the small town of Healy, New Hampshire, and it’s been an interesting drive, although Deacon knocked down all my attempts to talk to her about the people trying to kill us, the terrorist attacks, and the important thing we might have seen or heard in Afghanistan.

  “John, why waste time?” she says. “We’ll just be repeating ourselves when we meet up with Bastinelli. If you want to do something useful, catch some shut-eye while I drive. I promise I’ll wake you if I see anything interesting.”

  The interior of the Tahoe is warm, and the seat is comfortable, and damn if I don’t sleep some as we get deeper and deeper into rural New Hampshire.

  I wake up when we stop. We’re on a dirt road surrounded by tall trees. I rub my eyes. “Did I miss downtown Healy?”

  Deacon checks something on her iPhone. “There is no downtown Healy. Or uptown Healy. This is an unincorporated community in northern New Hampshire.”

  “Doesn’t sound too appealing.”

  “There’s no town government, no police, no zoning laws, and no property taxes. For a person like Bastinelli, this is very attractive indeed. We should be at his place in a couple of minutes.”

  I shift my feet, try to stretch my long legs, fail in the tight quarters. “You didn’t wake me up. I guess you didn’t see anything interesting.”

  “A male moose humping a female moose, but I didn’t think that was your style.”

  “Good guess.”

  She drives on, checking the odometer and her watch, then stops.

  “This is it,” she says.

  I lean over and see more brush, saplings, and tree trunks. “I’ll take your word for it, even if you do work for the mean ol’ CIA.”

  Deacon turns the steering wheel to the left. “It’s not that mean anymore, and I don’t work there. I’m just a consultant.”

  I want to point out that we’re not turning into any kind of road or lane, but Deacon seems confident and I keep my mouth shut.

  Then I see something unusual. The brush and the saplings aren’t high enough to block us and I hear the whip-snap sound of the Tahoe driving over firmly packed terrain. And we’re not sinking into the soft forest soil.

  Interesting—we’re on an invisible road.

  The brush thins out and now we’re on a visible gravel road heading up a gentle slope to a one-story brick and concrete house with what looks to be a concrete watchtower or steeple rising from its center. There’s a large, well-tended garden with a small pond off to the left, and attached to the opposite side is a garage, its exterior lined with white propane tanks. About twenty yards away, two cows and a number of goats and chickens mill about a freestanding barn.

  The windows in the neat and well-maintained house are narrow, and when Deacon stops the Tahoe and we step out, I look at them again and realize why they’re narrow.

  Firing slits.

  The front door opens up and Gary Bastinelli steps onto the porch, frowning. He has short brown hair and a closely trimmed beard and wears khaki pants, boots, a black T-shirt, and a holstered pistol on his right hip.

  “You intend to stay long?” he asks Deacon.

  “As long as it takes to get things figured out,” she says.

  He shrugs. “You get thirty minutes, that’s all.”

  Chapter

  67

  Inside, the house is a mix of military equipment (weapons, from pistols to automatic rifles mounted on walls; eight small screens on a kitchen counter show various video feeds from around the property) and the cute and mundane (Barbie dolls and Legos scattered across the wooden floor).

  Bastinelli points us to chairs at a large dining table, and when Deacon and I sit down, he comes over with muffins and a carafe of coffee.

  I say, “Good to see you, Gary. Even under the circumstances.”

  “Nice of you to say, John. Sorry about Billie.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How’s Willow doing?”

  I say, “Scaring me every day with how tough and smart she is.” I look around the house. “Kyra? And the kids, Joe and Vicky?”

  He picks up a mug of coffee. “Sent them away to the proverbial undisclosed location. Figured things might get dicey here in the next few days.”

  Deacon says, “Nice to get caught up on family affairs and all that shit, but let’s get to the topic at hand, shall we?”

  Gary says, “Who wants to start?”

  “I will,” I say. “Recently, Alex Cross and I were assigned to an interagency task force looking into the recent bombings and terrorist attacks. Before the second meeting, Alex and I were ambushed outside of DC Metro Police headquarters by professionals. He was seriously wounded and is in the ICU at George Washington University Hospital. Since then, there have been two more attempts to shoot me.”

  Gary says, “Nice to be popular.”

  “Safer to be a wallflower,” I say, and I spend the next five minutes telling him and Deacon about the task force, my meet-up with Mel, and my interactions with the Army CID. I wrap it up with our Zoom session, the deaths of Ruiz and Mel, and the creepy farewell from Harry Maynard.

  That gets Bastinelli’s attention. “Were you friends with this guy Maynard?”

  “No—we did some training modules together, that’s all. Seemed like a good guy at the time. When I figured out who he was, I passed his name and background along to an FBI friend of mine who’s on the task force. Maynard is the first real lead we’ve gotten.”

  Deacon is quiet. I say, “Elizabeth? Could you run down Maynard’s name as well?”

  “Doubtful,” she says. “You know the Agency isn’t supposed to operate in the U.S.”

  It isn’t supposed to. Major loophole indeed, I think. I say, “Elizabeth, give us a recap of our mission back in Afghanistan and what happened afterward.”

  She says, “You two and the others provided overwatch for me as we passed over the border from Tajikistan to Afghanistan. I had three parts to my mission. One, drop off classified ground observation platforms on various trailheads and roads. Overhead satellites and drones do a ninety percent effective job, but we needed to get that number to one hundred percent. Two, meet up with new members of the National Resistance Front, give them financial support for their fight against the new Taliban government.”

  Bastinelli shakes his head. “In other words, drop off canvas sacks full of Benjamins.”

  “If it works, it works,” she says.

  “Sure,” he says. “Paying other folks to bleed and die on our behalf—”

  I interrupt them. “What was the third part?”

  She puts her hands around the coffee mug. “To meet up with a prominent tribal leader in that region of Afghanistan and exchange some…information.”

  “Did that meet happen?”

  “No, he didn’t show up,” she says. “Even though he’d shown up for five previous meetings, and on time, which is a remarkable achievement in that part of the world.”

  “Other than that, anything out of the ordinary?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Just before we left,” I say, “I remember you having a heated conversation with an army general in our briefing tent in Tajikistan. You remember that?”

  “No,” she says.

  “You remember the general’s name?” I ask.

  “John, if I don’t remember the meeting, why would I remember his name?”

  “Just asking,” I say, thinking, Just verifying, because I remember you talking to that general, and from the looks on your faces, the two of you weren’t discussing next year’s Super Bowl. To Bastinelli I say, “Your turn. Anything come to mind?”

  He says, “First night we were in-country, I had watch. Cold as hell. And there was a row of flashes in the west…then I heard the rumbling. Did a time count. It was about five miles out.”

  I know what he’s talking about. Sound travels at roughly a thousand feet per second.

  “Why didn’t you say anything about that when we got moving again?” Deacon asks.

  A shrug. “It was five miles out and not in the direction we were going. Didn’t seem relevant. But it looked big, like one of the old B-52 Arc Light missions.”

  “Before Ruiz was killed, he mentioned a bombing,” I say. “A couple of locals told him that a village some distance from where we were located had been flattened from one end to another.”

  “By us?” Bastinelli asks.

  Deacon says, “No. I had no information that anything like that was in the works. If a village was attacked, it wasn’t by our military.”

  Bastinelli catches my eye and we exchange a look: Sure, the CIA can always be trusted. Always.

  He coughs.

  Right. As if.

  Chapter

  68

  I say, “If the village wasn’t struck by our military, who did it?”

  With ease, Deacon says, “There are a variety of possibilities. Maybe a false-flag op run by the Russians or the Chinese or an extensive attack by the Taliban with captured air assets once belonging to us on a village they considered rebellious. But you, John, what do you have?”

  “There was an aid camp we came across, remember?” I ask. “At the junction of two trails. Three tents, a small generator, and a beat-up white Humvee with red crescents painted on the roof and the hood. We were already late to the next rendezvous point, but I wanted to check them out, make sure there were no Taliban fighters there.”

  Bastinelli says, “What did you find?”

  “Under a fly tent, there were about ten or so locals. Older men, women, children. Lots of bloody wounds, soaked-through bandages. One doctor and one nurse working frantically to help them.” I feel the guilt returning—I knew I should have stayed and assisted, but I couldn’t. The mission first, always.

  “When I was sure the place was secure,” I say, “I started moving to catch up with you. But the doctor—he saw me, said something, grabbed my arm, and spat in my face.”

  “What did he say?” Bastinelli asks.

  “It was French,” I say. “I didn’t understand it.”

  Deacon looks to me. “Do you remember any of it?”

  I close my eyes, thinking back to that moment, knowing we were there illegally, that we were always on the brink of being ambushed, and remembering the doctor with the scraggly beard, red-rimmed eyes, blood on his surgeon’s clothes…

  I open my eyes. “It sounded like ‘Voo lav fate…say vota fote.’”

  Bastinelli says nothing, but I can sense something in Deacon’s look. “Elizabeth?” I say.

  She says, “Could it have been ‘Vous l’avez fait. C’est votre faute’?”

  I didn’t know Deacon spoke French. “Yeah, that sounds about right. What does it mean?”

  She reaches for her coffee. “‘You did it,’” she says. “‘It’s your fault.’”

  I’m about to ask her again what she knows about that village being destroyed when from the other side of the kitchen comes a low-toned bong-bong-bong.

  Bastinelli gets up from his chair, takes a look at the small TV screens showing exterior views, and flips a switch. The alarm shuts off.

  “Visitors,” he says.

  Chapter

  69

  Maynard is just outside Arlington, Virginia, in a small motel room near I-66; interstate traffic passes at a constant low roar. The place is starting to get on his nerves. There are cigarette burns on the walls and the carpet, and the air smells of grease and Lysol. And then there’s the clacking keyboard sound coming from the room’s other occupant.

  The obese man—Willard—is a former fellow contract employee from the National Security Agency, and Maynard owns him, lock, stock, and barrel. Many years ago, due to a slip on Willard’s part—when his little man was definitely doing the thinking for the big man—he used the NSA’s incredibly powerful and classified computer system to access certain video files on the dark web.

  Willard spent only two minutes and ten seconds on that site, but Maynard, his supervisor back then, knew it was enough. An agreement was reached, and Willard’s violation was covered by a postdated work authorization.

  “But don’t think you’ve gotten away with it,” Maynard told him. “Your ass is mine for the foreseeable future. One word of pushback, and your search history and the resulting video will be sent off to the FBI’s Crimes Against Children task force. And what you saw and downloaded guarantees a life sentence, which in your case might mean a year or two before some guys in your new home shank you to death.”

  Now Willard is staring at two large screens fed by banks of servers on the floor beside his fat legs. Even with his fat fingers, he works the keyboard quickly.

  “All right,” Willard says in a soft voice. “Give me what you’ve got.”

  Maynard passes over a thumb drive. Willard takes the drive, and Maynard is repulsed by the touch of Willard’s fingers.

  “How long to decipher?” he asks.

  Willard shrugs. “Depends on how encrypted the voice sample is. On the quality of your recording. Whether the NSA’s software can find the back door to let us in.”

  “Get to it,” Maynard says. “I don’t have all day.”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  The thumb drive is nearly invisible in Willard’s fingers, but he inserts it into a port at the side of the nearest terminal, puts a pair of earphones over his head, and starts working, murmuring to himself.

  On the left screen, there are jagged lines in green that repeat and repeat, and Maynard knows Willard is listening to the original recorded message from the Boss.

  “Okay,” Willard whispers. “Let’s try this.”

  On the right screen, rows upon rows of green numbers and letters flash by on the black background in one long rolling display. Every few seconds, Willard slaps the space bar, the scrolling of the numbers and letters stop, and he peers at the screen like he’s the first man to look at the Rosetta stone.

  More work, more keyboard pounding, and then Willard leans back in the chair and scratches his plump neck. After a moment, he snaps forward, works the keyboard again. The jagged lines on the other side appear, and there’s a second display right below it. Willard tears off the earphones, turns as best he can, and says, “Got it.”

  Maynard steps closer. “Show me.”

  Willard grins. His teeth are damn near tan. “You mean, let you listen.”

  Maynard clenches his hands. “Just do it.”

  Sensing the anger, Willard says, “Okay, here we go. This is a bit of the sample you gave me.” He presses a key, and from the speakers comes the familiar electronic voice of the Boss: “We’ve an emerging situation, and I want you to take care of it. Personally.”

  “And now,” Willard announces triumphantly. “This is what the real voice sounds like.”

  He presses a button, and Maynard listens to a human voice saying, “We’ve an emerging situation, and I want you to take care of it. Personally.”

  Maynard says, “This is it? The real deal?”

  “Yep,” Willard says, still grinning. “One hundred percent guaranteed. How does it feel, working for a woman?”