5:15 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time)
The Skies Above the Atlantic Ocean
"Are we ready for this, kids?"
The six-seat Learjet screamed north and east across the afternoon sky. The jet was dark blue with the Secret Service seal on the side. Behind it, the sun began to set. Luke gazed out his window to the east. It was already dark ahead of them-it was late fall, and the days were getting shorter. Far below, the ocean was vast, endless, and deep green.
Luke used his typical psych-up lingo, but it was rote. He didn't feel it. He'd been awake too long. He had too much weighing on him. And he had taken on a job that he probably didn't need to take.
He and his team used the front four passenger seats as their meeting area. They stowed their luggage, and their gear, in the seats at the back.
In the seat across the aisle from him sat big Ed Newsam, in khaki cargo pants, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a light jacket. He dropped his sunglasses over his eyes, against the sun streaming in his window. When he was relaxed, as he seemed right now, all of the muscle tension would go out of Ed's brawny, hyper-athletic body. He was like a flat tire draped across the seat. Ed was weapons and tactics, and Luke had rarely met a man more qualified-Ed himself was about as devastating a weapon as you could ask for.
Across from Luke and to the left, facing him, was Mark Swann. He was tall and thin, with long sandy hair pulled into a ponytail and fancy black-framed rectangular glasses-Calvin Klein. He stretched his long legs out into the aisle. He wore an old pair of faded jeans and a pair of big black Doc Marten combat boots. The boots made Luke smile-the man had never seen a minute of actual combat in his life, not that Luke would want him to. Swann was information systems-a wisecracking former hacker who got busted and joined the government to avoid a long prison sentence.
Swann and Newsam had come back from the Grand Canyon a couple days early-they said it wasn't the same without Luke and Gunner.
"Babysitting some out-of-date nukes?" Swann said now. "I suppose I'm ready."
"Worse," Luke said. "We're going to babysit some Belgians while they babysit some out-of-date nukes."
"You really think that's all there is to this, man?" Ed said.
Luke shook his head. "No. I think it's deceptive. I think we need to keep our eyes wide open and our heads-"
"On a swivel," Swann said.
They were playing their roles, and that was good. Swann and Newsam were tiptoeing around the news of Becca's cancer. Other than offering their condolences when they first climbed on board, they hadn't said anything about it, and he didn't blame them. It was a hard thing to talk about.
Directly across from Luke sat the newest member of the team-in fact, she wasn't even really a member yet. This was her first time with them. The Secret Service had borrowed her from the FBI on the recommendation of her superiors. She had barely said a word since they'd boarded the plane. Luke turned his attention to her now.
He had seen her dossier. Her name was Mika Dolan. She had been born in China, but given up for adoption by her parents, who had wanted a boy. She was adopted by a couple of aging hippies who realized late in life that they wanted a child. She grew up first on the coast in far northern California, then in Marin County, just outside San Francisco. She was young-probably too young. Twenty-one years old and already a year out of MIT; 4.0 grade point average, graduated magna cum laude. Tested IQ of 169-genius level, Albert Einstein territory.
Hobbies? She liked to surf. That part blew Luke's mind a little-she was a tiny little person, with big round glasses, and looked like she had barely been out of the house, never mind out on the water. But apparently, her dad loved to surf the big waves along the Pacific coast, and had his daughter on a board starting at the age of three.
Mika was the science and intel officer, starting her second year at the FBI, and now on loan to Luke. Whatever Mika's natural gifts were, she had big shoes to fill. Trudy Wellington was a lot of things-emotional, secretive, and quietly dangerous came to mind-but she had developed extensive networks in less than ten years, could access data no one else seemed to have, and was the best scenario spinner that Luke had ever worked with. Trudy was MIT, just like Mika. They had probably given him Mika for that reason.
"Well, Mika?" Luke said. "Would you like to start?"
"Okay," she said, struggling to maintain eye contact with him. She lifted her tablet computer from the seat beside her. "I'm a little nervous. You guys might not know this, but you're kind of legendary in my office."
"Oh yeah?" Ed Newsam said, apparently pleased. "What do they say about us?"
Mika suppressed a smile. "They say you're a bunch of cowboys. And they told me to try not to get killed while I'm with you."
Ed shook his head. "They're teasing you. Not everybody who comes with us gets killed."
"Only about four in ten," Swann said. "The rest live, although a high percentage of those are maimed for life. You'll probably be okay. The Bureau has a pretty good disability package, as I recall. "
Luke smiled, but didn't join in. Mika was very pretty, and the guys were flirting with her. He would let it go for another minute. It was a good way to break the ice, and maybe set her at ease a bit. This could be a hard-nosed group.
Luke himself felt wistful, not great. He doubted he could join in the banter if he wanted to. He had called Becca before they left. The conversation hadn't gone well. It had barely gone at all. He had told her he was leaving.
"Where are you going?" she said.
"Belgium. Outside Brussels. There's some concern about nuclear weapons stored on a NATO air base there. A terrorist cell is apparently going to-"
"So you're just going to leave?" she said.
"I'll be gone two or three days. I'm just going to inspect the security measures in place, implement some upgrades if necessary, then go into Brussels and question a few people of interest."
"Torture them?"
"Becca, I don't-"
"I have a Secret Service agent standing here in my living room, Luke. He just appeared on my doorstep this afternoon. Another one picked Gunner up at school today. Apparently, he walked right into the classroom before the children were even dismissed."
"Someone tried to kill me last night," Luke said. "The Secret Service are there for your-"
"Protection, yes, I know. Luke, I have cancer. We were going to break this news to Gunner together. You agreed to that. Now you're fleeing the country."
"Someone tried to kill me last night," Luke said again.
"Yes, I heard that part. Did it surprise you? Par for the course, I'd say. Meanwhile, my life is in actual danger, you made a commitment to me and more importantly to your son, and now you're running away. Again."
Luke took a deep breath. "Becca, I want to help you. I want to…do everything I can. But you kicked me out of the house the last time I saw you. And the time before that, come to think of it. When I picked up Gunner last time, I met you in a supermarket parking lot because you didn't want me to come to the house. And I'm not fleeing the country. I'm going to be gone a few days. I assume you'll still be alive when I-"
She hung up on that line, and he didn't blame her. It was a horrible thing to say. But she had gone out of her way to make his life a living hell the past several months. Now she was probably dying. Luke was sorry about that. He felt terrible about it, and about their relationship. He felt like a failure in every way-as a father, as a husband, as a person. But the way she was acting wasn't helping.
Now, aboard the plane, he shook his head to clear it. He had to compartmentalize. He was having problems, yes. He could recognize that he was in deep, deep trouble. He didn't know how to help his wife. He did not know how to fix any of this. But he also couldn't bring it with him to Europe. It would distract him from what he was doing, and then he'd become a danger to himself and the people with him. His focus on the job had to be total.
He glanced out the window. Far away, three F-18 fighter jets streaked across the sky, moving fast. Below Luke, white clouds skidded by in the last of the day's light. He took a deep breath. He looked at Mika again.
"How do you want to do this?" she said.
He made a two-handed gesture that seemed to draw a circle around the group. "The way we normally do it is you give us everything, every piece of intelligence you have, organized in order of importance, unless you have a compelling reason to go in another direction. Assume that we have no prior knowledge about the case at all-that way everybody ends up on the same page, no matter how much intel they came in with."
She nodded, then looked back down at her tablet. "I can do that."
"Let's start with the issue nearest and dearest to my heart," Luke said. "Who tried to kill me last night?"
"The man's name was Azab Mu'ayyad," Mika said. "Or at least that's what his current passport says. His papers indicate that he's a graduate student from Jordan and is thirty-two years old. But the man we believe him to be has at least ten aliases, and passports from four other countries. His name in Arabic means 'traveler blessed by God,' and it's likely this is just another self-applied alias."
"So who was he, really?" Luke said.
She was conferring with her tablet. She gazed into its glowing face, her thumbs moving in a blur. "NSA believes he was a Tunisian mujahid and hitman by the name of Abu Mossaui, which itself is another alias. He's probably closer to forty years old than thirty, a soldier for hire, and an enforcer among hardline Sunni groups. He was thought to have been active in Sub-Saharan Africa. He may have been involved in the kidnapping and execution of the Somali warlord Fatah al-Malik. There is data to suggest he was in Tanzania in 2011 at the time a beachfront resort there was bombed, killing thirteen members of an Israeli tour group."
"What kind of data?" Swann said.
Mika shrugged. "Flight records of a man arriving in Dar es Salaam with a name very similar to one of his known aliases. Surveillance photographs of a man in the old city who might have been him."
"Photographs that might be him," Ed Newsam said. "A man who had a similar name. Basically, you're saying nobody is sure who or what this guy was. He was a ghost, in other words."
Mika nodded. "He was a ghost, if you like."
"I do like. And he tried to kill Luke hours after our boy interviewed Don Morris in prison, and found out about a nuke plot in Europe. So they brought in a hitter-"
She raised a finger. "Careful. Luke has a long history of fighting Islamic terror groups, any number of which might want him eliminated, or want to take revenge on him. The two events could be unrelated."
"Who owns the pickup truck?" Luke said.
"No one owns it," she said.
"No one?"
"The original truck was a 2009 Ford F-350. It was totaled in a fatal accident three years ago. The owner, who was driving, was thrown through the windshield when the truck flipped in rainy and snowy conditions on a highway in western Pennsylvania. The truck was taken to a salvage yard, where it was sold for parts in a cash transaction to a mechanic allegedly based in Youngstown, Ohio. The mechanic was operating under an assumed identity. There's a city-owned vacant lot where his garage is supposed to be. The lot is a brownfield left over from a nineteenth-century leather tannery. The site received federal Superfund money in the late 1980s, but was apparently never mitigated. There has never been an auto mechanic shop located there."
"The truck is a ghost, too," Swann said. "The mechanic is a ghost. Even the garage is a ghost."
"And the Superfund money got ghosted," Ed said.
"Naturally."
The two men tapped each other's hands.
"The truck was rebuilt from junked parts of other trucks," Mika said. "Who did this is unknown. The license plates were stolen from a car stashed in long-term parking at BWI Airport. The registration is a fake, and the construction company it's registered to is a fake. The insurance cards are also clever forgeries."
"And the driver from last night?" Luke said.
Mika shrugged. "He abandoned the truck and escaped. There were no identifiable fingerprints-he must have been wearing gloves."
"I shot him, probably three times."
She nodded. "You definitely shot him. There was blood all over the driver's seat, and spatters of blood led away from the truck. The FBI lab took DNA from the blood, and has begun searching it against databases throughout the United States and Europe, with no matches thus far. We've also sent DNA samples to the Pakistani, Turkish, Saudi Arabian, and Egyptian intelligence services, but if we'll ever get a response, or if we'll believe the response we get, is anybody's guess."
"What about emergency rooms?" Luke said.
"Nine men received treatment for gunshot wounds in DC area hospitals last night, all of whom had accounts of their injuries that were corroborated by eyewitnesses. If your driver was treated for his wounds, it wasn't in a Metro hospital."
"Other areas?" Luke said.
"Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, Norfolk Virginia, and Wilmington, Delaware. It's all the same story. No unexplained gunshot wounds walked in the door last night."
Luke was reasonably impressed. She was young, but she was good at tracking down details. She had taken this about as far as could be expected before reaching a dead end. Of course, Trudy Wellington would have checked hospitals as far away as the New York metro region and Boston, and probably would have sent agents to interview DC area doctors who had lost their licenses and were treating criminal gangs at under-the-radar trauma clinics, but Luke wasn't sure that was a fair comparison. Trudy was thirty years old and had been with the FBI eight years-Mika was just starting.
"So we've got a corpse who might have been a Tunisian hitman, and we've got a truck that disappeared, then reappeared, and belongs to no one. We've got a getaway driver who was shot, and also disappeared. I'm willing to guess that this hit was in some way related to my conversation with Don. It's theoretically true that some terror group or another might want to murder me for revenge, but it just doesn't happen. People don't try to kill me that often-especially not while I'm out minding my own business."
"Is that what you were doing?" Swann said.
Luke looked at him.
Swann shrugged. "I know where the shootout happened. You were two blocks from Trudy's apartment. I'd hardly call that minding your own business. Either they followed you there, or they were already there, watching her place. Considering everything that's happened with Trudy and with Don-"
"All of which would confirm my point, wouldn't it? That it's related in some way to my conversation with Don?"
"I guess. Is this case all you talked about with him?"
Luke shook his head. "No."
"Care to elaborate?" Ed Newsam said.
Luke grunted. "Okay. Sure. Don and I talked at length about an exercise program he's developing. How to stay fit and strong while living in a seven-by-twelve-foot box. He wants to call it Prison Power. I wish I was joking."
He looked at Mika again. She had flushed crimson. The location of the shootout was something she had apparently known, but was reluctant to bring up. Or maybe the tension between team members embarrassed her. It didn't matter-she'd get over it, or she wouldn't.
"Let's move on, shall we?" Luke said. "Give us what else you've got."
He drifted a bit as Mika launched into the details of the Cold War nukes stored in Belgium, about the peace activists who had breached security there, and about the Brussels-based terrorist networks likely being harbored in the Islamic enclave of Molenbeek. He had gotten it all at the White House briefing, but Swann and Newsam hadn't, and it was important they hear it.
When it was over, Luke asked what to him was the million-dollar question:
"So what does your gut say?" he said.
Mika seemed confused. "My gut?"
He nodded. "Sure. You've got all this data, and I imagine you've digested it to some extent. What thoughts do you have? Are the nukes really in danger, or is something else happening? Will the attack come from Molenbeek? Is there any merit to this at all?"
Mika gave him a blank stare. This was where Trudy normally earned her keep-really, any smart person with proficiency in government databases and slicing through red tape could track down the data. The gold was in deciding what the data meant.
These were the moments when Trudy would bring in an idea straight from left field, or work backwards from a hypothesis that no one else had even considered. She would make bold, half-crazy assertions that couldn't be true-and then demonstrate step-by-step why they were not only plausible, but in fact the most likely possibility.
Mika slowly shook her head, clearly disappointed she was letting them down.
"I have no idea," she said.
