prone, hidden beneath the stripped and burnt-out chassis of a little Renault sedan. She was dressed from head to foot in black, with a black cotton jumpsuit for her torso, arms, and legs, black gloves, black boots, and a black watch cap to conceal her golden hair. She stared at the image in her night-vision binoculars. “Son of a bitch!” she swore under her breath. Then she spoke softly into her own radio. “Did you see that, Max?”
“Oh, I saw it,” confirmed her subordinate, posted farther back in the shelter of a small copse of dead trees. “I'm not sure I believe it, but I definitely saw it.”
CIA officer Randi Russell focused her binoculars on the three men grouped around the street lamp. She watched silently while two more men — one very tall, with auburn hair, the other an Asian — crossed the street and joined the others. Working swiftly, the two newcomers rolled ben-Belbouk's corpse up in a black plastic sheet and lugged it away.
Randi gritted her teeth. With the dead man went the fruits of several months of hard, concentrated research, complicated planning, and risky covert surveillance. That was how long her section of the CIA's Paris Station had been tasked with tracking the recruitment of would-be Islamic terrorists in France. Zeroing in on ben-Belbouk had been like finding the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. By monitoring his contacts they were beginning to build comprehensive files on a host of very nasty characters, just the sorts of sick bastards who would get a thrill out of murdering thousands of innocents.
And now her whole operation was wiped out — well and truly wrecked by a single silenced shot.
She rubbed at her perfectly straight nose with one gloved finger, furiously thinking. “Who the hell are those guys?” she muttered.
“Maybe DGSE? Or GIGN?” Max speculated aloud, naming both the French foreign intelligence service and the country's counterterrorist specialists.
Randi nodded to herself. That was possible. The French intelligence services and counterterror units were known for playing rough — very rough. Had she just witnessed a piece of government-sanctioned “wet work” designed to rid France of a security threat without the inconvenience and expense of an arrest and a public trial?
Maybe, she thought coldly. If so, though, it was a remarkably stupid thing to do. While alive, Ahmed ben- Belbouk had been a window straight into the deadly underground world of Islamic terrorism — a world that was almost impossible for U.S. and other intelligence services to penetrate. Dead, he was useless to everybody.
“They're pulling out, boss,” Max's voice said in her ear.
Randi watched closely while the three men in overalls folded their ladder, shoved it into the back of their van, and drove away. Moments later, two cars, a dark blue BMW and a smaller Ford Escort, pulled onto the darkened avenue and followed the van. “Did you jot down the license plates on those vehicles?” she asked.
“Yeah, I got 'em,” Max replied. “They were all local numbers.”
“Good, we'll run them through the computer once we're finished here. Maybe that'll give us some idea of which jackasses just kicked us in the teeth,” she said grimly.
Randi lay motionless for a while longer, now focusing her binoculars on the small gray boxes fixed to a number of lampposts up and down the avenue and on the nearby side streets. The more she studied the boxes, the odder they seemed. They looked very much like containers for a variety of sensors, she decided — complete with several apertures for cameras, intakes for air sampling devices, and short, stubby data relay antennae on top.
Weird, she thought. Very weird. Why would anyone waste money setting up a whole network of expensive scientific instruments in a crime-ridden slum like La Courneuve? The boxes were reasonably unobtrusive, but they weren't invisible. Once the locals noticed them, their life span and that of the equipment they contained would be measured in minutes at most. So why kill ben-Belbouk just because he was starting to raise a fuss? She shook her head in frustration. Without more of the pieces to this puzzle, nothing she had seen tonight made much sense.
“You know, Max, I think we ought to take a closer look at what those guys were installing,” she told her subordinate. “But we're going to have to come back with a ladder to do it.”
“Not tonight, we're not,” the other man warned. “The crazies, druggies, and jihad boys are due out on the streets any minute now, boss lady. We need to git while the gittin' is good.”
“Yeah,” Randi agreed. She tucked her binoculars away and slithered gracefully backward out from under the charred Renault. Her mind was still working fast. The more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed that killing ben-Belbouk had been the primary aim of the men installing those strange sensor arrays. Maybe his murder was just a piece of unintended collateral damage. Then who were they, she wondered, and what were they really up to?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
FBI Deputy Assistant Director Kit Pierson saw the weathered signpost caught in the high beams of her green Volkswagen Passat. HARDSCRABBLE HOLLOW— [A MILE. That was her next landmark. She tapped the brakes, slowing down. She did not want to risk missing the turnoff to Hal Burke's run-down farm.
The rolling Virginia countryside was covered in almost total darkness. Only the quarter moon cast a faint glow through the solid layer of clouds high overhead. There were a few other farms and homes scattered through these low wooded hills, but it was already past midnight and their inhabitants were long since asleep. With chores and early morning Sunday church services awaiting them, most people in this part of the state went to bed early.
The rutted gravel drive to her CIA counterpart's weekend retreat appeared just ahead, and she slowed further. Before turning onto it, though, she glanced again in the rearview mirror. Nothing. There were no other headlights in sight along this desolate stretch of county road. She was still alone.
Partly reassured by that, Pierson turned her Passat onto the track and followed it uphill to the house. The lights were on, spilling out onto the weed-and bramble-choked hillside through partly drawn curtains. Burke was expecting her.
She parked next to his car, an old Mercury Marquis, and walked quickly to the front door. It opened before she could even knock. The stocky, square-jawed CIA officer stood there in his shirtsleeves. He looked weary and rumpled, with shadowed, bloodshot eyes.
Burke took one suspicious look around, making sure that she was by herself, and then stepped back to let her come into the narrow front hall. “Did you have any trouble?” he asked harshly.
Kit Pierson waited for him to close the door before replying. “On my way here? No,” she said coolly. “At my meeting with the director and his senior staff? Yes.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“They weren't especially pleased to see me in D.C. instead of still out in the field,” she said flatly. “In fact, there were several rather pointed suggestions that my preliminary report was entirely too 'thin' to justify coming back in person.”
The CIA officer shrugged. “That was your call, Kit,” he reminded her. “We didn't need to meet here in person. We could have worked through this problem on the phone if you'd just sat tight.”
“With Smith starting to breathe right down my neck?” she snapped back. “Not likely, Hal.” She shook her head. “I don't know how much he knows yet, but he's getting too close. Shutting down the Santa Fe police probe was a mistake. We should have just let the local cops go ahead and try to identify your man's body.”
Burke shook his head. “Too risky.”
“Our files were scrubbed,” Pierson said stubbornly. 'There's no way this Dolan character could have been linked to either of us. Or even to the Agency or the Bureau as a whole.'
“Still too risky,” he told her. “Other agencies have their own databases — databases over which we have no control. The Army has its own files, for that matter. Hell, Kit, you're the one who's so panicked about Smith and his mysterious employers! You know as well as I do that anyone pegging Dolan as an ex-Special Forces officer would be bound to start asking some goddamned tough questions.”
Burke showed her into his study. The small dark-paneled room was crowded with a desk, a monitor and keyboard, two chairs, several bookcases, a television, and racks full of computer and communications equipment. An open half-empty bottle of Jim Beam whiskey and a shot glass sat on the desk, right next to the computer
