The Last Spymaster (44 page)

She exchanged a worried look with Armand. “Let’s go,” she told the children. “It’s almost time for the last story hour at the library.”

They trooped out to her small white limousine. Above them, streetlights glowed through the dusk. She and the children climbed in back, and Armand got behind the wheel. But Dante seemed to trip. He slapped his hand on the roof, catching himself. The noise made the children jump. They looked at her with large eyes.

“It’s fine, kids,” she said softly. “Dante just stumbled.”

She watched as he shook his head and forced himself erect. He seemed to have recovered by the time he climbed in beside Armand, who put the car into gear and drove off. But as the limo swayed around a curve, Dante struggled to reach down. Finally he managed to pick up his Uzi. He embraced it.

Marie pulled Kristoph onto her lap. “Do all of you know I didn’t have chocolate ice cream until I was nearly twenty years old?”

“No!” Aaron said, disbelieving.

“Ah, but it’s true. Where I grew up, chocolate was a luxury. Only the very richest people could afford it.”

The limo cruised along the dark waterfront. Mariette opened her book. Marie turned on the overhead light so she could read. Kristoph sucked his thumb, and Aaron described a new boy at school who seemed to be a potential friend.

Suddenly in the front seat, Dante mumbled a slurred curse, “Shunbish.” He tried to raise the Uzi but instead slumped heavily against the passenger door, limp as a rag doll. His jaw slackened, his tongue lolled out, and drool dripped from the corner of his mouth. The powdered OxyContin had finally hit him.

Marie felt a flutter of excitement. Armand screeched into a U-turn and sped off in the opposite direction.

“What’s happening?” Aaron asked, his voice rising. “Is something wrong?” Mariette wanted to know, letting the book fall to her lap.

Marie looked at the children, her voice urgent. “We’re going on a little trip, darlings. Just the four of us. We’ll—”

Mariette’s voice shook. “Will Daddy be with us?”

“Daddy has important business to finish first,” she told her daughter calmly.

“Are we going to the island early?” Aaron wondered eagerly.

Marie felt a small panic. Martin had brainwashed the children. She would have to undo that, but first she must get them safely away. “Not to the island, sweetie. Still, we’ll have a lot of fun. Promise.”

Aaron subsided but peered at her suspiciously. Seeming confused, Mariette raised her book, hiding in it as she often did. Kristoph squirmed on her lap, oblivious.

Armand peeled the limo off onto a side street and stopped behind a rented Taurus. He grabbed Dante’s Uzi and got out as she reached across Mariette for the door. Suddenly an SUV screeched up to their rear fender, engine pulsing, bright lights igniting the limo’s interior. Her heart seemed to stop. Instantly a second SUV careened alongside them, braking next to Armand. Four armed men leaped out.

“Leave her alone!” Armand shouted, raising the Uzi.

There was one silenced shot, and Armand crashed back onto the hood, head at an unnatural angle. Marie gasped. The children screamed. The Uzi fell to the ground.

Kristoph cried out, “Armand!” He reached out his arms, opening and closing his little hands as if trying to draw Armand to him.

Marie bit back a sob and cuddled him close as Martin’s Ukranian guard, Karl, slid in behind the wheel, and another of Martin’s armed men dropped into the passenger seat next to him. She pulled her older two children protectively close while Kristoph buried his face in her shoulder. Aaron and Mariette looked up at her with stark fear. Their little bodies trembled as Karl turned and aimed his Uzi casually at her. He smiled, showing brown teeth.

“We just in time,
da,
Mrs. G? Good thing Mr. G said keep close eye on you today. Put GPS tracker on your limo. Smart, huh?”

Washington, D.C.

“It’s your turn, Jay,” Raina said as she drove them around the darkening swath of Thomas Circle. Fill me in.”

He took a deep breath. Beginning with his prison breakout early yesterday, he described what had happened and what he had learned. At last, he concluded, “So now we know Ghranditti’s deal is with al-Qaeda’s successor organization.”

“I’ve never even heard of the Majlis,” Raina told him worriedly. “That alone is frightening, because I oversee a lot of antiterrorism—or I did.” Regret filled her voice.

“I understand.” As he glanced at her, his cell phone rang. He had been sitting with it between his hands. He flipped it open and checked. “It’s Elijah,” he told her.

She frowned. Jay answered the call.

“Frank and Palmer are on the line,” Elijah told him. “I’ve been trying to raise Elaine, but she’s not answering. I’ll try again.” If Elijah were Moses’s source, he gave no indication he was surprised to hear Jay’s voice.

“Don’t bother,” Jay said smoothly. “We dropped her off at a friend’s house. She finally admitted she was in over her head.”

“Really?” Elijah said, disappointed. “I thought she was tougher than that. Damn. Sorry to lose her. Palmer, you want to handle the report to Jay?”

“Absolutely.” Filled with concern, the older man’s voice gave no hint of duplicity, either. “It’s an understatement to say we’ve got a nasty kettle of silverfish on our hands, Jay. Glad you’re sitting down. Take a deep breath. The news is Ghranditti’s shipment appears to be nothing but high-tech—which is bad enough. Far worse, it’s not just
any
high-tech. It’s fucking state-of-the-art. Everything—absolutely everything—is cutting-edge. The
U.S. government’s best, latest, most covert, most ingenious—and deadly. Plus it covers the whole spectrum—weapons to intelligence gathering, detection to communications.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Elijah admitted. “I’ll read you the list.”

Jay turned on the speakerphone so Raina could hear. As Elijah talked, her eyebrows rose, and she paled.

When he finished, Elijah concluded worriedly, “No one’s ever assembled anything like this for even a friendly government.”

Jay took a deep breath. “If the Majlis get all this, God help the world!”

Elaine pushed through a throng of tourists and dashed down the steps of L’Enfant Plaza and into the underground mall, listening to the careening noise of the Whippet operatives chasing her.

Covered in sweat, her lungs heaving, she shoved her Walther into her purse and slowed to a quick walk, ignoring the stares of shoppers and commuters heading to catch the Metro. Ducking into Harper’s, a small women’s clothing store, she wove among the goods until she reached a distant wall where she could see the door. With luck, her pursuers would rush past and she could slip back out and escape.

At last she saw them through the window—the big man with the broad chest in the lead, his face red and murderous. He paused to talk to the others and sent them off in different directions. Then he turned to enter the shop. Her chest tight, she dropped low and crawled under hanging racks, heading back toward the door. She watched the shoes of the big man and two others as they stalked inside, their feet heavy. They stopped occasionally. Finally their knees bent. They were going to look under the clothing.

She grabbed the top of the metal rack and pulled herself up among long dresses. She could taste her sweat as it streamed down her face. Her arms began to ache. At last she heard the feet return to the door. Again they stopped. With relief, she let herself down softly.

“You stay here,” a basso voice ordered quietly. “Watch for her. She’s got to be around somewhere.”

Raina drove east. The sun had disappeared, and dusk had swallowed the golden light of sunset. They had received more phone calls from Elijah then Palmer, asking whether they were all right and where they were. Jay had dodged their questions smoothly.

As Raina stopped the car at a red light, she looked closely at him, feeling a strange curiosity. The geometry of his jaw had softened, and age lines etched his skin. As they always had, his hazel-colored eyes gave a sense of ice chips from a glass of fine bourbon, cold and brittle, while she sensed, as she used to, he secretly wanted to be warmed by the right human hands. He was still very handsome, and there was a muscularity to him that made him seem as physical as ever. She had a fleeting memory of what a principled man she had once thought him.

After he tried to call Elaine again, Raina could feel him studying her, although he was clearly not seeing her. It gave her a strange sensation to remember his habits so well: “You’re trying to figure out something, aren’t you?”

He nodded. “We used to do this together. Help me, will you? Now that we know how unusually dangerous Ghranditti’s shipment is, I’ve been trying to understand what in hell is going on with Larry Litchfield. Information is power, and ForeTell is the planet’s most effective vehicle to deliver information. But he’s apparently selling it to the Majlis al-Sha’b despite knowing as much or more than we do about how dangerous they are. Has he gone insane?”

“Maybe the answer is more complex than madness or greed.” The light turned green, and she drove off.

Suddenly Jay sat up straight. “I think you’re right.” He peered at the traffic then at her. “Back in the eighties, the White House ordered NSA to ‘penetrate banks to combat money-laundering and other criminal activities and illegal sales of high technology to the Soviet Union.’ I remember one of NSA’s solutions was to install a backdoor in a forerunner of ForeTell. A backdoor is a few lines of code hidden inside hundreds of thousands of lines of programming instructions. Then no matter where the software is
used, Baghdad or Paris or Timbuktu, all you have to do wherever you are is hit the right keystrokes and you can track employees, take money from bank accounts, manufacture records—even change the trajectory of missiles or download everything in their database. And you can do it without leaving any footprints, no audit trail at all that you were there.

“In those days, it was the most powerful software in the world. So Langley created front companies to peddle the backdoor version. A lot of nations snapped it up—France, Canada, Germany, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, to name a few. So did a lot of multinationals, including
all
of the big wire-transfer clearinghouses in America and Europe. Mossad got into the game, too, with their own backdoor. The intel was so extraordinary that we stopped assassinations and savage attacks. Then somehow word leaked out, as it always does eventually, about what we were doing. The news spread like an epidemic among IT people. When no one could find the backdoor lines of code, everyone destroyed their software. And suddenly our ocean of intel went dry.”

She had an awful feeling. “There was no reason to bring in Kristoph to make ‘final adjustments’ on ForeTell—it was already finished. So you think Litchfield used him to design a backdoor!”

Jay clasped his hands in his lap, weaving the fingers into a knot so tight his knuckles turned white. “Bin Laden’s people knew about the first backdoor, because he had one of the versions. That means al-Hadi and the Majlis would immediately suspect anyone who wanted to sell them ForeTell. Their prejudice that we’re all just greedy, godless infidels would work in Litchfield’s favor if he offered it to them for a large amount of money—but it wouldn’t be enough for them to take the risk. That’s why I figure Litchfield’s working with Ghranditti. Ghranditti’s shipment is such a threat to us that the Majlis have to believe Litchfield wouldn’t gamble on letting them have it
and
the software—unless all he really did care about was the cash.”

“Good Lord. Litchfield
is
insane. The Majlis could find out tomorrow the software’s dirty and never even use it, and they’d still have the high-tech shipment!”

He grimaced. “They could kill tens of thousands, if not millions, of us.”

Shocked, they fell silent. As the lights from other vehicles flashed into the car, she tried to find a solution.

Suddenly Jay’s eyes narrowed. “We’ve got to take the fight to Ghranditti.” He dialed his cell.

His fingers hammering the keyboard of his wireless laptop, Frank Mesa sat alone on a park bench under a towering maple tree in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. Cloaked in evening shadows, just outside the rim of one of the park’s lamplights, he had been making phone calls, collecting information about Martin Ghranditti.