The Lance (The PROJECT: Book Two) (8 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

They skirted the Capitol
and crossed the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Elizabeth turned right onto Memorial Parkway. In a short time they came to the Marine Corps War Memorial. The thirty foot high bronze figures were frozen in time as they struggled to raise the flag on Iwo Jima. The flag flew overhead in a brisk autumn breeze. In the distance the Washington Monument thrust white and shining into the blue sky.

America.

Ronnie and Selena came across the grass. The four stood facing each other next to the polished granite base of the memorial. Ronnie set his black box down on the ground between them.

"
Hell of a thing," said Ronnie. "Someone bugged my Hummer, high end stuff, government issue."

"
My car, too, Ronnie. We have to assume Selena's car is tagged also."

"
What's going on, Director?" Selena brushed a wisp of hair away from her forehead. It was a habit Elizabeth had noted.

"
Nick is blown. He found our contact in Jerusalem dead. Someone was waiting and tried to kill him, too. NSA has a new boss, General Dysart. I've got a bad feeling about him."

Selena
's voice was strained. "Is Nick all right?"

"
Yes."

"Dysart is bad news." Ronnie looked up at the flag. "He's one of those Pentagon desk jockeys who thinks paper work is more important than body armor. Why is Hood gone?"

"He's
in Walter Reed, supposedly with a stroke."

"
Supposedly?"

"Maybe Hood's stroke wasn't an accident. Hood goes down. Then
Dysart calls me up and tells me I should terminate a mission he's not supposed to know about. He's blocked my classified access to NSA. We're being surveilled. Someone tries to take Nick out of the picture. I think we've stumbled into something."

Ronnie looked down and scuffed his shoe against the
grass. "You think someone's going after Rice? You sound like you think there's a conspiracy to take over the NSA. Who could set that up?"

"Dysart said he'd been talking to Lodge, so CIA may be in on this, too."

"What's our next move?"

"
I think we'd better be damn careful. Whoever's behind this may try to take us out of circulation. If Dysart or Lodge are involved, we're in trouble."

Elizabeth looked around. The only people in sight were an older couple some distance away. The man was taking pictures of the Memorial.

"I think we go to ground," Elizabeth said.

Stephanie said,
"The safe house?"

"
Yes. We've got everything we need there. No one at NSA or Langley knows about it."

The safe house was in the rural Virginia countryside,
an hour and a half from Alexandria. Elizabeth had set it up two years ago. Not even the President knew about it.

"
We'll leave now for the house. Then we decide our next moves. If I'm right, it won't be long before people will be looking for us."

Elizabeth looked up at the flag, then back at the others. "Agreed?"

The four got back in their vehicles. In a short time it was as if they had disappeared from the face of the earth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Carter and Rivka were in the sushi bar at Nick's hotel. It was evening. Two of the president's entourage sat at the end of the counter, watched by a Secret Service agent loitering near a tall, potted palm.

Nick's headache was gone. The fingers of his hand were swollen and stiff, but aside from that he felt pretty good. He
downed a cup of sake, to help his fingers.

"
So, now you've seen Old Jerusalem." Rivka sipped her sake and set it down. She lifted a piece of
maguro
with her chopsticks. "I'm curious. What do you think?"

"
It's like a schizophrenic's dream. Like three or four different worlds."

"
They are different worlds. Jerusalem puts on a face of diversity but it's a time bomb. Jews, Christians and Arabs are all crammed into sections of the city side by side. They don't like each other."

"
Religion doesn't have much to do with reason."

"
That's the problem."

"
You're not religious?"

"
I love my religion, but I'm what they call a secular Jew. The Orthodox disapprove of people like me. Those kinds of divisions in Israel make it hard to get any real consensus."

"
Like peace with the Palestinians."

"Like that."
She nodded and dipped a tuna roll into soy sauce. "It's an impossible situation. Too much blood's been spilled. There's too much anger."

"
You sound like Ari." He poured another cup of sake. It was good, light and dry, not too sweet.

"
Ari's right. All that's likely to come out of this trip by your President is trouble."

Carter
looked at his watch and signaled for the check.

They
walked out to the lobby and the elevator.

"
I'd better ride up with you," she said. They got out on the fifth floor and walked along the deserted corridor. At Carter's door, he stopped short. He held up his damaged hand and slipped his pistol out. The tell-tale he'd placed on the door was out of place. Rivka drew her pistol. She held it pointed toward the ceiling in both hands.

Maid service?
She mouthed the words. Nick shook his head, pointed at the Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the handle.

He
took the plastic room key out of his pocket, stepped to the side of the door and inserted it into the slot. A green light came on with a loud click. The lock released. He pushed the handle down. Like most modern hotel doors, it was designed to close by itself. No way to throw the door open and have it stay that way.

Maybe this was nothing. Maybe the maid had come in and
left chocolates on the pillow.

He
pushed the door in hard and went in fast and low, gun held out in front. The room was dark. The glass balcony doors were halfway open. He'd left them closed. Across the way, the illuminated fortress walls of the Old City crowned the ancient hills. A cool desert breeze bearing the clean smell of Jerusalem pine and fading heat came in from the terrace.

To
the right, the bathroom door was open. There was no one inside. A short wall blocked the part of the main room with the bed. Rivka was right behind him, silhouetted against the hallway lights outside the room.

A black figure appeared on the terrace and fired. His gun
spit hard, raw coughs and bright flashes from the muzzle. Nick fired three quick shots. Blooms of light lit the room as he pulled the trigger. Rivka's pistol barked next to him, crisp, flat explosions.

The glass doors to the terrace disintegrated
. The bullets drove the shooter back over the balcony railing. His scream lasted past all five floors to the courtyard below. It stopped suddenly with a sound like someone dropping a sack of wet cement.

Rivka w
ent down to her knees and folded forward onto the carpet. There was a bloody hole on her back.

She moaned, her face contorted
with pain. Nick grabbed towels from the bathroom and pressed them against the wound. The bleeding slowed.

"
You're okay, you're okay. Don't move. I've got the bleeding stopped."

Rivka was chalk white, clenching her jaw.

"You got him, he went over the balcony. The bullet missed your lung. Don't worry."

Nick
was pumped from the adrenaline and he was angry. He'd blown it. He should have made sure she stayed outside. He told himself Rivka was an experienced agent who knew the drill. It didn't make him feel any better.

Running footsteps and shouts in the hall told
him they'd have help soon.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The safe house sat back from the road on
ten acres of rolling Virginia countryside, shielded by a spread of giant oaks planted fifty years before the first shots fired in the Civil War.

The house was
a classic ante-bellum southern home, two stories of weathered brick with a slate roof, paned windows and a wide chimney rising at each end. A railed gallery painted white ran along the second story and formed a columned porch along the front of the house. The gallery looked out over fields where Bobby Lee's boys in butternut and gray had passed in a vanished time. A low wall of fieldstone marked the boundaries of the property. Signs warned trespassers away.

Th
e trees and landscaping hid cameras and sensors. It would take a rocket propelled grenade to get through the innocent looking front door. The windows were authentic in style, but they were made of bullet proof glass.

Elizabeth believed that a safe house needed to be
safe.
There was even an emergency escape tunnel. Maybe it was overkill, but it was satisfying to anyone with reason to be cautious or paranoid.

Elizabeth
's paranoia was in full bloom.

Stephanie
had hacked into NSA and was probing for anything to hint at what was going on in Dysart's mind. The security monitors on the wall above her in the darkened room showed nothing except serene countryside straight from a realtor's dream book. The ground alarms were active and silent.

Ronnie and Selena were in the kitchen cooking up spaghetti and meatballs. Except for the weapons
on the kitchen table it could have passed for a normal dinner hour in America.

Elizabeth
's white silk blouse was limp, stained with dark rings under her armpits. She wrinkled her nose at the sour smell of her own stress. Stephanie's fingers moved across the keyboard, entering a steady stream of commands.

Elizabeth began coughing, trying to catch her breath. Sharp pain spread through her chest.
Not now!

"Are you all right, Director?"

"Yes." She coughed. "Excuse me. I'll be right back."

She got to her feet and went into the bathroom and closed the door. Coughing, she reached into her purse for a small black case. She opened it and took out a syringe and glass vial. She fitted a needle, punched through the rubber seal on the bottle and drew 5cc of clear liquid into the syringe. Her fine, thin boned hands trembled. She pushed air out of the syringe, sat on the toilet, exposed her thigh and injected the liquid.

She waited for the symptoms to pass. In a moment, she began to feel better. She found the inhaler in her purse and took a deep breath into her lungs.

The doctors had said the attacks would come more often, but she hadn't expected it so soon. She looked in the mirror, at the dark shadows under her eyes. She flushed the unused toilet, patted water on her face and went back to the computer room.

"What have you got, Steph?"

Lines of code streamed across the monitor. Stephanie's fingers flew over the keyboard. "
I'm into the main servers and past the firewalls. Now I'm after Dysart's emails. He's got sophisticated encryption, something I haven't seen before, but I think I'm close."

"
Will anyone know if you get in?"

"Yes
. But they won't know who did it or where it came from. I won't have much time once I crack it, but I'll download everything as fast as possible. We should get most of it before the system shuts me out."

The screen cleared an
d a list of files appeared.

"
I'm in!"

Stephanie tapped a key
. A window appeared with a moving bar marking progress of the download. Elizabeth watched. Ten per cent downloaded. Fifteen. Twenty-five. She realized she was holding her breath, exhaled. Fifty-six per cent. Seventy. Seventy-eight. Ninety-three. The screen went blank. Stephanie tapped a key, disconnected.

"
We got almost all of it. Right now they're going nuts over at Fort Meade, but there's no way they can trace it back here. It will look like someone in Uzbekistan was playing games."

Ronnie called from the kitchen.
"Chow's up! Come eat."

Elizabeth
's stomach growled. Dysart's files could wait another ten minutes. As she sat down her phone signaled a call from Nick. She turned on the speaker.

"
Director, what the hell's going on?" 

"General
Dysart took over NSA this morning. He knew you were in Jerusalem and wanted me to recall you. He's not supposed to know you're there. Nobody is. Then someone bugged our vehicles, high tech. Our security is compromised. I don't know what's happening, but it smells rotten. We're all at the safe house."

"
Someone came after me again. Twice. The first time it was a couple posing as tourists. They're dead. Then someone tried when I went to my hotel room. He's dead too, but he got one of Shin Bet's agents. She's in bad shape."

She?
In his hotel room? Who was Nick hanging out with?
Selena felt flushed, then guilty.
Someone tried to kill him and you're jealous. What's the matter with you?

"
Are you all right?" Harker said.

"
Yes."

"
Nick, I think Dysart is setting up the President. Maybe an assassination."

"The Director of NSA? Are you serious?"
Nick's voice faded in and out.  It sounded like someone talking from the bottom of a well filled with electronic gargling, but Selena could hear the shock in his voice.

"Yes."

"Can you prove it?"

"
Not yet, but my gut tells me I'm right. I want you to get close to Rice. I'll call him and set it up."

Elizabeth
looked at her spaghetti cooling on the table. Ronnie wasn't waiting. He twirled pasta on his plate with his fork while he listened to the conversation.

"
Arslanian had a flash drive in his hand when he was killed," Nick said. "I'm going to upload it to you now."

Elizabeth watched the download progress
on her phone until it was done.

"Got it."

"Director, I'm blown. I should get out of here."

"Rice needs you there. T
ell him there may be a plot to assassinate him and that I'm working on proving it."

"
I don't like it." He paused. "When will you call Rice?"

"
Now. As soon as this conversation is over."

"
Then I'm gone." Nick broke the connection.