made her way to the door. Through the peephole she could see a man in military uniform. Without undoing the chain, she opened the door a fraction.
“What is this?” she mumbled.
“Dr. Kathleen Dianne Jones?”
“Uh-huh… who are you?”
The man held up an I.D. card, which named him as a captain in the Marine Corps.
“May I come in, please, ma’am?”
Kady hesitated, her hand hovering over the chain, uncertain whether to trust a stranger, even one in uniform. Yet the I.D. looked genuine enough. She opened up and stepped back into the room, her suspicions now giving way to the embarrassment of being seen with no proper clothes, her hair unbrushed, her face un-made-up, and her room a mess.
“Thank you, ma’am,” said the captain. “You need to get ready to leave here at once. There is a car outside, waiting to take you to Andrews. You will be boarding a flight there. I cannot tell you the precise destination of that flight, but I have been authorized to inform you that it is somewhere in Europe, and you are advised to pack for a trip of two to three days’ duration, some of which may involve work in the field.”
“But…” Kady just stopped herself from saying, “I haven’t got a thing to wear.” Instead she managed, “My field equipment is all back in New Mexico.”
“I’m sure whatever you need will be provided, ma’am. But you’ve really got to hurry. I’ll leave you now. I’ll be waiting outside the front entrance. Five minutes, okay?”
The captain did not wait for her reply before he left the room. He simply assumed she could wash, dress, fix her appearance, and pack, all within the space of five minutes.
Only a man could be that dumb.
Jaworski told Tom Mulvagh to cancel his plans for the weekend.
“Does Horabin know about this?” asked Mulvagh, once he’d been told the news about Vermulen and the link to Waylon McCabe.
“He will. But you know Horabin, Tom. He doesn’t wipe his ass without figuring out how it’ll impact the President’s poll ratings. We can’t wait for him to make up his mind how to respond to this. We have to find out what McCabe’s been doing. Now.”
“I’m on it.”
The FBI is no different from any other organization: At half past four on a Saturday morning it’s not at its most dynamic. So agents weren’t leaping from their beds and making for their cars within minutes of Mulvagh getting the call. People had to be found, woken, and briefed-both FBI staff and the people they needed to interview. A couple of hours went by before the first information started getting back to Mulvagh.
In Europe and the Middle East, however, the day was already well under way. Even if the Pentagon brass were groggy when they got the call from Jaworski, their men and women in the field were wide awake and ready to go.
84
It was midday in the Adriatic. For the past three hours, Vermulen had been locked in consultation with Marcus Reddin, his second-in-command, transforming the information from the bomb list into a workable mission. The yacht’s communications systems had been used to download maps and plans. Calls had been made to the contacts supplied by Pavel Novak and the Dutchman Jonny Koolhaas.
Now there were nine of them in the main saloon: Vermulen, Alix, the Italian scientist Frankie Riva, Marcus Reddin, and the five men under his command. The room had been swept for bugs and a screen had been set up at one end, where Vermulen was standing, with a remote control in his hand. He was about to start when there was a respectful knock and a steward poked his head around the door.
“Sorry to disturb you, General, but the captain thought you might like some refreshments. I have coffee, juices, some pastries, if you’d like them.”
Vermulen was about to refuse the offer, but then he saw the faces of Reddin’s men light up with the soldier’s instinctive willingness to accept any offer of food and drink, whenever it may come.
“Sure-come on in,” he said, and the steward pushed in a cart laden with enticing snacks, from which the aroma of fresh coffee wafted. The next few minutes vanished in the filling of cups and loading of plates.
“Everybody ready?” Vermulen finally asked. “Okay, then, gentlemen, let me brief you on your mission.
“What we are going to do tonight has the potential to change the course of history. We have the chance to strike a mighty blow against not one, but two of the greatest threats currently facing the world: rogue nuclear weapons and international terrorism. And this is how we’re going to do it.”
He pressed the remote and the screen filled with a map of a land-locked territory shaped like a roughly drawn, irregular diamond, one hundred miles across at its widest point.
“This is the province of Kosovo, which is currently part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It lies inland, roughly eighty miles from the coast of the Adriatic Sea to the west. Kosovo is currently entering the early stages of a civil war between the majority of the population, who are ethnic Albanians-that’s Albania, down there on the southwest border of Kosovo-and the minority, who are Serbs-that’s Serbia, to the north and east. Long story short, the Serbs have been ruling the Albanians, and the Albanians don’t like it. They want Kosovo to be an independent state. The Serbs don’t want to let them go.
“So what’s it got to do with us? Simple. The Albanian cause is being hijacked by Islamic terrorists, just like the cause of freedom was hijacked in Afghanistan. These terrorists, operating all over the world, pose a clear and present danger to the United States, and our government is choosing to ignore it. And that danger is all the greater because there is a small-scale nuclear bomb, right here in Kosovo, planted by the Russians ten years ago or more.
