Pandora's Grave (36 page)

All the same, Estere kept glancing toward the sky as they rode, a worried look on her face.

“What is it?” he asked, after a time.

“The
bahoz
.” She lifted a hand to the breeze, sniffing at the air. “I can smell rain.”

“What does that have to do with the horse?” he inquired, aware he was treading on a sensitive subject.

Her face wore a puzzled expression for a moment, then it cleared in sudden realization. “
Bahoz
is the Kurdish word for storm. A storm is coming. We may need to take shelter.”

The TACSAT buzzed at his side and he motioned to Estere to halt. “Hello,” he answered cautiously, reining in the stallion.

“Thomas, this is Hamid.”

“How are things progressing?”

“Fairly well. We’re having to dance around Petras, but I think things are shaping up. Kranemeyer pressured CENTCOM to release a squad of Army Rangers as escort.”

“Is that necessary?”

“I’d prefer it. She’s wanting us to be particularly careful with a Kurdish warlord, one Khebat Ahmedi. She forgets that I was born in this country—I know these people. And I prefer a show of force.”

“Bluff and swagger,” Thomas expressed, summing it up succinctly.

“Exactly. I need to establish our rendevous. Do you have a map?”

“That’s a negative. One moment.” He looked over to where Estere sat on her horse. “How well do you know this area?”

“Quite well,” she replied. There was no bravado there, just a simple statement of fact.

Thomas raised the satphone again. “I’ll let you speak to my guide. She was raised in these mountains.”

“She?” Hamid asked, laughter in his voice “How do you always manage it, Thomas? Put her on.”

He extended the TACSAT to her and she took it, listening as Hamid laid out his plan of action. Thomas watched her as they talked, steadying the impatient stallion between his knees. At length, she closed the cover of the phone and handed it back to Thomas, shooting another anxious glance skyward.

Even in the intervening moments, clouds had begun to move in, darkness drifting across the face of the sun as the mercurial nature of mountain weather asserted itself.

“We need to ride southwest to meet with your military. There is a place–south of the Qandil. I know it well. It is about forty kilometers from here.”

“It looks like your storm may be upon us soon.”

“I know,” she replied, looking up at the clouds. “There is a mountain stream, about twenty-nine kilometers ahead of us. We need to reach the ford before the rain swells the stream.”

“Can’t we go around?”

She shook her head. “A detour of nearly seventy kilometers. It is the nature of these mountains, Thomas. It is what has kept my people alive.”

“Then let’s ride.”

10:45 A.M. Local Time

Mossad Headquarters

Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

Harry raised his eyes from the dossier in front of him, staring through the one-way glass at the civilian in the interrogation room on the other side—Dr. Moshe Tal. In the previous two hours, he had gone through every scrap of information the Israelis were willing to give him on Tal. Unmarried, devoted to his work—and his country. Growing up on a kibbutz in the shadow of the Golan, Tal had early learned what it meant to defend his land.

And yet this reticence. Harry motioned to the guard, who had stood silently by the door the entire time. “I’m ready.”

Tal’s eyes flickered up at his entrance, then back down, a furtive, almost hunted look. Harry had seen it before, the look of a man broken beyond his endurance. For a brief moment, he wondered how far Mossad might have gone in trying to wrest his secret from him. Then he dismissed it without another thought. It was irrelevant to the task at hand.

He drew up a chair and sat down wordlessly, across from the archaeologist. Another long, interminable moment passed before Harry spoke.

“The Iranians are planning something, aren’t they?”

Tal raised his head, a strange light coming into his eyes. It was such a contrast to his previous browbeaten demeanor that Harry wondered for a moment if he was facing the same man. “Yes,” he replied. “They are.”

“What?”

The archaeologist shook his head. “I’ll never tell you. You left my people behind. You left them to die.”

It was as though Harry’s first question had given him a feeling of control, a sense of being in charge. Harry grimaced inwardly. Time to take that away. With a careful motion, he opened his sports jacket, withdrawing his diplomatic passport and identification, placing them on the table beside them.

“I’m from the U.S. State Department. I didn’t leave anyone behind.”

Tal took the passport and ID, scrutinizing them carefully. “You’re no diplomat,” he announced, looking back up.

Harry smiled. “Let’s call it a polite fiction.”

“Who are you?”

“Joseph Isaac,” Harry replied, tapping the ID before tucking it back in his wallet. “You can call me Joe. I’m your salvation.”

The archaeologist settled back in his chair, an expression of disbelief on his face.

“You see, there were Americans among your crew. President Hancock authorized a CIA strike team to rescue them. Our people arrived in the dark of night, just hours after Mossad brought you back here. And we were able to extract some of your team.”

Tal leaned forward, an almost painful eagerness on his face. “Some?”

Harry nodded. “Unfortunately, not all. The Iranians were on alert. We lost some people as well.”

“How can I believe you?”

Reaching once more into his jacket, Harry laid a cellphone on the table between them. A wire stretched from it to an earbud microphone, which Harry promptly inserted.

“We’re going to place a call to one of your colleagues. I believe you know Grant Peterson?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I will give you the number to dial,” he continued, fixing the archaeologist in a cold gaze. “And you will speak directly to Grant. This is a token of good faith. Don’t abuse it.”

Tal nodded his assent and Harry gave him the number to dial.

4:02 A.M. Eastern Time

A CIA safe house

West Virginia

“You said he would call, Roberto,” Grant Peterson said, looking up into the eyes of the man he had been staying with for the past week.

“He will,” the man called “Roberto” replied, in one of his longer speeches. Whether he had a last name or not, Grant had no idea. Whatever his skills, conversation was not among them.

Almost at that moment, the man’s hand went to his pocket, withdrawing a vibrating cellphone. He cast a quick glance at the screen before handing it over to Peterson.

“Answer it.”

“Hello, this is Grant.”

“Grant!” It was Dr. Tal, nervous excitement in his voice. “Thank God you’re alive. Where are you?”

“Here in the US,” Grant replied, looking over at Roberto as though to ask if he should be more specific. Something in the man’s face told him he should not. “Are you okay, doctor?”

Tal seemed not to hear him, rushing on as if the question was irrelevant. “The rest of the team, Grant. Are the others all right?”

Grant opened his mouth to speak, but in that instant, the line went dead.

11:06 A.M. Local Time

Mossad Headquarters

Tel Aviv, Israel

“Wrong move,” Harry stated calmly, replacing the phone on the table. “I told you not to abuse it.”

Tal stared at him, his eyes wide with sudden fear. “You’re sick.”

A shrug was the only reply Harry gave to the accusation. “You and I have business to discuss. You give me what I want, I’ll tell you who lived and who died. Not until.”

“How can I trust you?”

“You can’t. But you’re running out of options. You know Grant is alive and safe. Let’s work from that basis.”

“What do you want?”

“I think you know.”

The archaeologist looked away, towards the blank wall of the interrogation room. “All right,” he said at last, taking a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ll talk.”

Rising from his chair, Harry moved across the darkened room, punching a gloved fist through the drywall. His fingers closed around a thin wire.
Just where Carter said it would be
, he thought before snapping it as he would a twig.

Circling the room, he came up against the opposite wall and retrieved the other parabolic mike, disabling it in similar fashion. The bugs were dead.

“What is he doing?” Shoham wondered aloud, watching the scene live on the TV screen in the Mossad operations room.

Gideon leaned forward. “I can take my team in.”

“No,” the general replied, shaking his head. “We gain nothing by direct action. Let Nichols run his course.”

The next minute, their TV screen went black as someone draped a jacket over the camera lens.

“Move to my chair,” Harry instructed, returning to the table. “Sit with your back to the glass.”

“Why?”

“With that camera dead, they’re going to move next door. I don’t want them to be able to read your lips.”

“Who are you?”

Harry turned back to the table, his gun hand resting on his hip, near the holstered .45. Time was running short. He stared at Tal, not bothering to respond to the question. “Talk.”

4:39 A.M. Eastern Time

The White House

Washington, D.C.

“Thank you for coming in early, Director,” President Hancock said, looking up from his desk as a pair of Secret Service agents ushered David Lay into the Oval Office. “It is the imperatives of the campaign season, you understand.”

“To be sure,” Lay responded, acknowledging the presence of Lawrence Bell with a brief nod. “Missouri today?”

Hancock nodded. “Air Force One departs from Andrews at seven o’clock.”

Preliminaries out of the way, the DCIA opened the folder in front of him. “First on the agenda is the Eilat situation.”

“So I saw,” Hancock nodded, a biting edge to his voice. “I’m sure you understand, David, that this is one of my concerns with these so-called ‘deniable’ operations. They have a way of ending up on CNN.”

Lay bit his tongue. “There was a leak.”

“Isn’t there always,” came the President’s irony-laced rejoinder. “How many people did we lose?”

“None. A couple from Savannah were in the crowd and killed in the blast, but other than that collateral damage, no one. Our operations personnel extracted safely.”

The President paled. “Collateral damage? Dear God, David, do you realize how cold you sound?”

Lay briefly looked at the ceiling of the Oval Office, sighing heavily. “That’s the spy business, Mr. President. People get hurt. People get killed. We’re busy tracking down the leaked information as we speak.”

“Do the Israelis know about the biological weapon?” Hancock asked, a sudden intensity creeping into his voice.

“No,” Lay replied, looking surprised. “You gave orders to that effect, and they have not been contravened.”

“Good.” Hancock sank back into his chair. “See that they aren’t…”

11:57 A.M. Local Time

Mossad Headquarters

Tel Aviv, Israel

After Moshe Tal finished talking, silence reigned in the interrogation room for the space of about two minutes.

Harry sat there, silently regarding the archaeologist as he processed the information he had been given. None of it was recorded, unless Ron Carter’s intel had been bad and there was a device he had missed. He had taken no notes. Everything was committed to memory.

Taken all together, Tal’s information tallied with the intelligence the CIA had gotten from the debrief of the rest of the team. The pneumonic plague had been contained in the mass grave of the Persian city, lying dormant over the centuries until its release by the archaeologist’s dig. Opening Pandora’s grave, to speak of it figuratively.

He stood, turning toward the door as if to leave. “What about the others?” Tal asked, a plaintive note in his voice.

“What?”

“You promised. Who lived?”

Harry turned back, leaning across the table until his face was only inches from that of the archaeologist. “They all did,” he whispered, his lips barely moving. “And if you want to keep it that way, you need to do exactly as I say.”

The expression on Tal’s face was a curious blend of surprise and relief, mingled with an overwhelming fear. “What?” he asked, his hands trembling uncontrollably.

“Tell anyone what you’ve told me and your friends die. And if anyone asks, you told me nothing. Can you remember this?”

The professor nodded mutely. Harry walked over and lifted his jacket from over the lens of the surveillance camera. “Good. Your friends are depending on you.”

And then he was gone, opening the door and disappearing into the corridor. Shoham was waiting outside…

2:03 P.M. Tehran Time

The Alborz Mountains

Iran

The rain had come. First in huge droplets, heavy orbs of water splashing down from on high. Then steady rain, soaking their garments. Finally wind-driven sheets of water, falling from an ink-black sky. Lightning lit the scene as the riders pressed on, mounts splashing through pools of standing water.

Thomas bent low over the neck of the stallion, urging him forward against the fury of the storm, endeavoring to keep pace with the girl on his right.

“How much farther?” he called out. For a minute, he thought she hadn’t heard him, his words whipped away in the teeth of the wind. Then, her hand flew out, three outstretched fingers giving him his answer. Three kilometers. .

12:09 P.M. Local Time

Mossad Headquarters

Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

“So, that’s all you were able to get out of Tal?” General Shoham asked, glancing up from his notes.

“Yes,” Harry replied, lying easily. “Nothing actionable, unfortunately. His best guess is that his communication with the Ayatollah was hacked.”