one, is that it?” He looked down at his limp arm and oddly bent leg. “After all this shit you did to me, we’re not even by a long shot,
Nate walked over to stand in front of him. “After all this shit I did to you, I’m gonna drive you back to town, and you’re gonna call your homies and they’ll come pick you up, and you’re not gonna to do anything to me, her or anyone else. I’m not doing this for you—I’m doing it for a bigger reason than you can even begin to comprehend.
And after I drop you off, and you tell your boys whatever bullshit story you want to tell them, we’re through. No more deals, no more looking the other way, no more scratching each other’s back. I’m done with you—I’m out.”
Tracy watched the exchange as she tried to mask the shell-shocked look on her face. In the past three minutes, her entire perception of Nate had been wiped away as if it had never existed.
“Just like that?” Lopez’s face had run the gamut from patronizing to incredulous to furious while Nate had been talking. “Listen, asshole, you aren’t walkin’ away from me that—”
Faster than Tracy could follow, Nate drew his pistol and placed the barrel against Lopez’s temple. “Yeah, it is that easy. The way I see it, you got two choices. Either you agree to what I just laid out right now, or you don’t, and hop yourself right into a shallow grave. Now what’s it gonna be?”
Lopez’s eyes flicked over to the barrel of the pistol resting against his skin, then back to Nate’s cool blue gaze. He was silent for a few seconds. Tracy feared he was going to do something stupid, but finally he replied, “All right, when we get back to the city, you and I are done. But know this, done means done. You get in my way on the streets tomorrow, and I will take you down without thinking twice.”
Nate withdrew the pistol from the gang leader’s head.
“Fair enough, ’cause I’m gonna do the exact same thing if you cross my path.”
“As long as we understand each other. Too bad—for a pig cop, you were all right. Now get me back into that truck before my dick freezes off.”
“I always knew you were a smart man, Lopez.” Nate didn’t help the other man, but didn’t hinder him, either. The gangbanger hobbled to the back door and climbed in.
Nate walked past Tracy as she stared daggers at him.
“I’ll explain on the way to Providence. Let’s go,” he said.
“Jesus, Kate, you been holding out on me? This guy’s got balls the size of grapefruit, and he knows how to get things done, that’s for damn sure. Where the hell did he come from, and why haven’t we poached him yet?”
Denny had checked in with Kate after attending a party thrown by a consortium of energy lobbyists in Washington. He attended several of these events each a year, so he could get the scuttlebutt about what was going down on Capitol Hill. He also kept an ear open for potential trouble spots around the world. Denny had attended in his international-businessman persona. He had run a multi-national Fortune 500 company for more than a decade before covertly joining Room 59.
After the party had wound down, he had logged on to report his findings to Kate, who had been engrossed in listening to the events that had been going down in Texas.
After giving him a summary, she sipped iced lemon tea and shook her head.
“I’m not surprised that you’d like this guy once you heard this. I don’t have to remind you that we’re not looking for cowboys here, remember?”
Denny shook his head, which was still perfectly groomed at five in the morning. “No, we’re looking for guys exactly like this one, men—or women, for that matter—who can evaluate a situation quickly and take whatever steps are necessary to solve it. Hell, once he knew what was on the line, he barely hesitated when he had to step outside the law to get what he needed.”
Kate raised her glass to hide the quick smile on her lips; Denny had walked into her subtle trap. “Right, so what would happen if we brought him in and gave him less rules and even more control? Yes, he’s effective, but he’s too much of a loose cannon. I thought Tracy might be able to control him, but instead he seems to have brought her over to his side, which surprises me a bit.”
“Does it, Kate? You know what’s at stake here, and I think your analysis put together the two people best suited to find this nuke outside one of our own operatives.” Denny leaned forward in his leather chair. “I think they’re doing exactly what you want them to do, the law and their careers be damned in the bargain if necessary.”
Kate bristled at the insinuation. “You have one too many at that Georgetown mansion? No one made them break the law to get that information. They know full well the risks they’re taking. What they’re doing, in their eyes, is the right thing—putting the end result ahead of the means. That’s what we do here every day, so watch that sanctimonious tone.”
“Now who’s been staring at their computer monitor a little too long? I didn’t say I disapproved. Shoot, you know some of the things I’ve done in the name of God and country, and thankfully it was to people who deserved it.
And it’s one thing to send in one of our boys or girls to do a job we know needs doing. It’s just that sometimes I find it a bit unnerving to deal with people who don’t know who’s really pulling the strings to make them dance, people who are on our side, too. Yet we expect the exact same results from them.”
Kate slumped in her chair and took a breath. Denny’s words had hit a nerve, one she preferred not to show. “Yes, but we’re only so large, and even with our resources, we can do only so much ourselves. But if we wait for the bureaucrats to get off their keisters and actually act instead of just endlessly discussing the threat, who knows how many might suffer or die in the meantime? If the American intelligence community is a huge, often indiscriminately wielded club, I like to think of us as the scalpel that excises the dangerous cells before they destroy the entire body.
Sometimes there can be a bit of collateral damage—unfortunate but necessary, I’m afraid. And as an ex-SEAL, you must have run into the same thing more than once.”
Denny had, in fact, commanded a team of the elite military force for several years. “Yeah, and I was never fond of it back then and still am not. These two are certainly competent, and I’d like to see them both come out of this in one piece,” he said.
“You and me both, so let’s see if we can’t give them some help. How you coming on that list of potential launch points?”
“I put some of our brightest on this, with dinner for two at the D.C. Capital Grill on the line as a reward for their analysis within eight hours.”
“Really? What happens if your winner lives outside the area?”
Denny smiled. “I fly them in and put them up at no cost—but they don’t know that yet. By the way, why are you so sure that a company is involved—why not just a few guys who rent a truck and drive it into a metropolitan area to set it off?”
Along with the screen she was using to talk to Denny, Kate had her own data-mining screen open, as well as a window with all of the available information on their ultimate quarry, Sepehr al-Kharzi. “That’s a good question, but the answer is quite simple—al-Kharzi doesn’t think that way. His psychological profile indicates a fervent belief in his cause, jihad, of course, but also a grandiose way of thinking. His last attempt on America involved the largest amount of explosives that would have been used in the U.S. since the Oklahoma City bombing. He aspires to be the next bin Laden—a megaterrorist whose name would strike fear into our hearts, and strengthen his allies. The suitcase nuke would cause death and destruction in any city it was detonated in, but that’s only striking at one head of the hydra he thinks America is. His ego wants more than that, which is why we think he’s trying to execute something on a much higher scale. For all the low-profile living he’s been doing, he wants to take a swing at us that will send America reeling, and that means outdoing 9/11, which is a tall order indeed.”
Denny frowned. “Yeah, which makes it even more unlikely that he or his people haven’t popped up on someone’s radar yet.”
“No one ever said that the terrorists haven’t learned from their mistakes. For every ill-conceived plot to attack an isolated fuel pipeline at JFK, there’s an as-yet-undetected sleeper cell working very hard to contaminate the water supply of a major city. They’re becoming smarter, more capable of exploiting the holes in our security net, which, as you well know, are pretty large in places—like the border,” Kate said.
