The Ares Decision

as possible — one that demanded lies that could expose her. Once again, Omidi had demonstrated that while he was as evil a son of a bitch as she’d ever met, he was by no means stupid.

“Attacks on the frontal lobe and related areas of the brain are correlated with blood loss, but only loosely. What I’m talking about here isn’t increasing parasitic load; it’s making it more targeted. It’s actually possible that this would slow the time to fatal blood loss, because bleeding is just a secondary effect.”

“Are you certain that death is from blood loss?”

His question sent a jolt of adrenaline through her that she struggled to hide. Did he know something?

“Injury and exhaustion are probably the number one killers,” she equivocated.

“But barring that?” he said.

“I…I think blood loss is the obvious answer, but I haven’t looked directly into it. I’m not a neurologist.”

“Ah,” he said, gesturing toward the man directly to his right. “Fortunately for us, Yousef here is.”

Dr. Yousef Zarin was the only person on her team that she hadn’t been able to fit into the categories she’d developed. The men she now thought of as the softies were generally clean shaven and round faced — academics and research scientists who appeared to have been plucked from their cushy university jobs by Omidi right before she arrived. Many seemed as frightened as she was and were prone to dropping things if you walked up behind them too quietly.

The second category was the believers. They were men with wiry builds and full beards who had less intellectual horsepower than their softy counterparts. They, too, seemed to fear Omidi, but more in the sense of being awestruck by him. When he talked about the rise of Iranian power and the decline of the West, they tended to get a faraway stare that recalled Soviet paintings of farmers.

Then there was Zarin. He was wiry and wore a rather grand beard, putting himself firmly in the category of believer. On the other hand, he was quite brilliant and, when he thought no one was looking, seemed worried. Clearly softy traits. The final test — his reaction to Omidi — was impossibly enigmatic. He seemed almost dismissive of the man.

“I’d be interested to hear what Dr. Zarin’s found,” Sarie said.

He nodded, fixing dark, controlled eyes on her. “I believe that the victims’ blood loss is exaggerated by their profuse sweating and constant motion. Dr. van Keuren is correct that injury or exhaustion is the most likely cause of death, but if we ignore those factors, it will be damage to autonomic brain functions, and not blood loss, that kills them.”

Sarie realized that her polite smile had been frozen long enough that it was probably starting to look painted on. She tried to relax, but inside she was cursing like her father used to when one of the cows knocked down a fence. If Zarin had already figured that out, what else did he know? What else had he told Omidi?

“And the issue of making it transportable?” a believer whose name she couldn’t remember said. “Faster onset makes using a human host even more difficult.”

“I don’t think it should be much of an issue,” Sarie responded. “I’ve never found a parasite that couldn’t be transported with much more primitive equipment than you have access to. But trying to work out a way to do that now isn’t a good use of our time. There’s no telling what sympathetic changes will occur when we start the selective-breeding process, so any transportation procedure we come up with now may not work later.”

In truth, the likelihood of the modifications they were talking about having any effect on transportability was about zero. But the longer she could keep them from being able to deliver their weapon, the more time she had to carry out her plan to sabotage it.

71

Western Iran

December 3—1051 Hours GMT+3:30

Sepehr Mouradipour peered through his scope at the line of men partially obscured by blowing snow. The shallow draw they were traveling along was nearly flat, and the easier terrain had, as anticipated, allowed their formation to tighten.

He was wearing a white hooded jumpsuit and was partially buried, lying on an inflatable mattress to keep him insulated from the cold. Even his face was streaked with greasy white paint, breaking up its outline and transforming it into just another exposed area of earth and rock.

The group he was tracking appeared to consist primarily of his own countrymen — followers of Farrokh, according to his information. Traitors and atheists. It would be a pleasure to kill them, but that was just an unplanned bonus.

He finally found the men he was being paid to take out near the middle of the column. Both were wearing light gray Western ski clothing, the one in front broad shouldered and dark complected, with black hair poking out from beneath a wool hat. His companion was thinner and had fair skin burned red behind ski goggles.

Mouradipour pressed a button on the side of his rifle, sending a signal that the targets were two hundred meters out. An LED built into his sunglasses flashed seven times in response. His men were ready.

It took a little longer than expected for the column to cover the distance, but speed was notoriously hard to predict in this kind of terrain and he was confident that his team would make any necessary adjustments without his involvement. He demanded nothing less than perfect discipline from his men and had dug many graves for those who didn’t live up to that standard. The group he was working with now had completed nine missions of this type without a single material error.

Mouradipour waited until the middle of the column was even with a cliff band that he was using for perspective, then sent out three clicks in quick succession.

It was over almost before it started.

His men burst from their buried positions and snipers appeared along the ridge across from him. A few of Farrokh’s men made awkward grabs for their weapons, but most were hung on packs out of reach or were incompatible with the bulky gloves they seemed to favor. In less than five seconds, everyone in the column was on their knees with hands laced on top of their heads.

Mouradipour snowshoed down the slope and approached the first of the Westerners, ripping his hat off and comparing his face to the photo he’d burned into his memory. The coloring was right, as were the high cheekbones, but the eyes were not the intense blue he’d been expecting. A trick of light? Contacts?

When he dragged the broad goggles off the second man’s face, Mouradipour was horrified to find the unlined skin of someone in his early thirties.

“Trap!” he screamed in Persian, clawing for the rifle on his shoulder.

The intermittent crack of controlled gunfire sounded and his men began crumpling around him. Their prisoners, who had seemed so awkward and exhausted a moment before, dove to the icy ground so as not to block their hidden compatriots’ line of fire and pulled weapons from beneath their jackets.

Mouradipour had barely managed to get a hand around his rifle when his feet were swept from under him. Before he’d even landed, a thin strand of wire was looped over his head, cutting through the insulated collar of his jumpsuit and tightening around his neck. Every move he made now caused the icy metal to dig a little deeper.

A lone skier became visible down canyon, moving stiffly through his dead and dying men. The outline was inexplicable — strangely curvaceous and willowy despite heavy clothing. He squinted upward, his confusion growing when the figure stopped in front of him and pushed back a thick hood, revealing the short blond hair and perfect skin of a young woman.

“Make your phone call,” Randi Russell said, gritting her teeth and adjusting her rifle into a slightly less excruciating position on her shoulder.

The flight from America crammed into the cargo hold of a C-141B Starlifter, the clandestine crossing of the Iranian border, and nineteen hours tracking these bastards hadn’t done much for her mood.

Fred Klein had been so enamored with the body armor he’d provided her — waxing rhapsodic about how the genetically modified silk was four times stronger than Kevlar and how it tipped the scales at only ninety-eight pounds including the fake blood packs duct-taped to it.

In the end, though, her reluctance to stand in front of an Afghan assassin’s bullet wearing something made of