Dark Zone

Patriarch Noah’s. Perhaps that was the one true Lord’s actual intent, thought Mussa. It was not his to know beforehand.

But the possibility was delicious, was it not?

Mussa turned to the window, gazing toward the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

Delicious horror. And it would come at the climax of his complicated plan for revenge: personal revenge for the death of his father, revenge on the nation that had discriminated against him and his family, and revenge on the race that had devastated his people. God was powerful.

“And when will I be paid?” asked the engineer.

Mussa turned around, pretending to be shocked. “I thought you were working for the glory of Allah.”

“Always,” said the engineer. “But I must also see to worldly concerns.”

“You’ve spoken to Arno?”

“As you directed.”

“And the brothers?”

“The brothers?”

Arno was Mussa’s lieutenant and was doing much of the work on the Chunnel project; it was necessary that he be kept informed. The brothers were another story.

“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” added the engineer. The man was very good with computers, but he was not a convincing liar, and so his confusion now reassured Mussa that the brothers — known to him as Said and Jamal, though he doubted those were anything like their real names — had not been contacted. He did not trust them and had kept their operation isolated from his own concerns.

“I’ve done everything you asked,” said the engineer.

Mussa nodded. “Then you will be paid promptly, by the grace of God.”

“The sooner the better. And will there be a bonus?”

“A bonus? Oh yes.”

The engineer began to smile. As he did, Mussa took a Glock 25 from his pocket and put three bullets through the engineer’s forehead. Mussa had not planned to kill the man himself, but his greed disgusted him.

3

William Rubens, the head of Desk Three and the number two man at the National Security Agency, got up slowly from his bed and took a deep breath. He held it, as he had been taught by his yoga teacher many years ago, then slowly exhaled. He repeated the process twice more; after the third time he stretched forward, hands together, and began the sunrise pose, the first yoga posture he had ever learned.

Rubens regarded yoga more as an interesting collection of ideas than tenets of religion, and his daily routines were more physical workouts than spiritual exercises. He did not believe that souls recycled through the universe, and the Indian theory of the body and its different energies and cycles seemed laughable to him. But the postures did send a warm surge up his spine, relaxing him in a way that sleep never seemed to accomplish.

Rubens had never slept well, and these days he slept as poorly as ever. It was not the tension of his job; he had dealt with that for a long time. A personal matter bothered him, which was unusual for Rubens. He liked to say that he had no personal matters, and it was not so far from the truth.

He finished his routine and went downstairs for his coffee. After he poured it, he put his right index finger on the small pad at the right of the secure computer on the countertop. With the fingerprint recognized, the computer proceeded through the first stages of its boot-up. When the screen flashed, Rubens pulled the keyboard out and typed in his passwords, allowing the computer to proceed, tying into the NSA system by a secure connection.

As he waited, he picked up the remote and turned on the small television across the room near the bread machine that he had never used. Rubens had probably as little love for the television as he had for baking bread (the machine was a present from one of his many and mostly annoying cousins), but he had come to appreciate the fact that it was important to check the mainstream news media every so often. The daily news summaries he received via e-mail could not communicate the impact of television’s visuals.

He lingered on CNN only long enough to realize that the anchor was pontificating about a sports drug scandal. On Fox, a man in a rumpled gray suit declared that the time had come to invade North Korea. The text under the man’s face claimed that he was a former CIA analyst. Rubens knew the man well enough to know that this was indeed true — and that the man’s area of expertise had been European farm commodities. Rubens listened for a minute before deciding that the analyst knew as little about Korea as Rubens did about European wheat.

If there was a time to invade North Korea, it had been in the 1990s. Clinton had blown it, like much else — but that was all academic now.

Rubens flipped through a few more channels before turning his attention back to the computer. Once a cut- and-paste Xerox job, the daily briefing was now delivered to the upper echelons of the administration via e-mail with links to more detailed information available on SpyNet, an exclusive intranet service used by the government’s “information” agencies, of which the NSA was one. Ruben scrolled through the e-mail quickly. It was all very low- level, and nothing piqued his interest.

A good thing. That meant nothing had blown up overnight.

He emptied his cup of coffee and picked up the black phone that sat at the side of the computer. The phone looked as if it dated from the 1960s, and it was in fact possible that the outer shell did. Inside, however, the phone held a state-of-the-art encryption device that rendered his conversations indecipherable to anyone who did not have a similar model. And in theory — much in the field of encryption was theory, for the most part impossible to definitively prove or, to put it more accurately, not worth the time needed to prove — only the person with the number Rubens dialed would be able to understand what he said.

“Art Room,” said Marie Telach, picking up on the other end of the line. She knew it would be him, but the flat, neutral answer was part of her personality. The fact that she never deviated was a large part of the reason he had chosen her for her job, though lately she had shown alarming signs of being human.

A vacation would cure that, no doubt.

“This is Rubens. How is the Korean operation proceeding?”

“Lia is on her way to the airport. She’ll be in Beijing in a few hours.”

“Very good. And the other matter,” added Rubens. “Tommy Karr and Charlie Dean?”

“There was a complication.”

“A complication?”

The mission had been a routine milk run.

“Tommy stopped a purse snatching near the Courts after they landed in London.”

Was that all? Rubens glanced at his watch. “Making the jump to police work, is he?”

“They’re on schedule. The meet isn’t for a while yet and everything looks fine. But I thought I should mention it because the robbery victim—”

“Please don’t tell me it was a member of the SVR,” said Rubens, using the Russian initials for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sluzhba Vneshnev Razvedki, one of the successors to the Cold War era KGB.

“No — it was Deidre Clancy, the daughter of our ambassador to Great Britain.”

Rubens did not know Ambassador Alroy Clancy very well; he’d been appointed to the post largely as a reward for his service to the President’s campaign committee. This was exactly the sort of complication Rubens could live with.

“He didn’t realize who it was,” added Telach. “He thought she was just another pretty girl. I expect you may hear about it at some point.”

“I appreciate that, Ms. Telach. Anything else?”

“Nothing at the moment.”

He looked over at his clock. “I’m off to my seven o’clock appointment. Keep me informed on the Korean matter. You can buzz me.”

“Yes, sir.”

The politically connected ambassador to Great Britain owing Desk Three, and by extension William Rubens, a