“So you’re both okay?” Harper asked. Ryan was pressed uncomfortably into a booth just outside of the hospital, a pay phone held to his ear. He needed to be outside for a while. The thin wall housing the phone rubbed at a long stripe of raw skin on his left arm, and the pain worked with the bite of the air to remind him that he was still breathing.
“We’ll make it. A lot of other people didn’t,” he replied. “Naomi’s right arm was banged around pretty bad. I was sure it was broken, but the X-rays came back negative. They gave her a sedative; she’s asleep now, I think. Suicide bombers in D.C. The audacity of these bastards. John… I don’t know how to fight that.”
“We just got the first numbers.” Harper paused for a moment, beats of silence filling the empty space. “As of 5:00 PM, 64 dead, 121 injured. Obviously, that’s going to climb tomorrow when they finish going through the rubble.”
Ryan didn’t respond. There didn’t seem to be much to say.
“Listen, you’ve had a long day. If it hasn’t caught up with you, it will. We’ll talk in the morning.” A longer pause this time.
Harper sounded tired. Tired and weak. The combination served to gently ease yet another yoke down onto Ryan’s shoulders, the burden of uncertainty. He wondered how much more he could carry before he crumbled under the weight.
“It’s good to hear your voice, Kealey. I was worried there for a while. Give my regards to Naomi — the department already sent flowers to her room.”
“That was good of you, John. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
After hanging up the phone, he leaned against the cold brick wall facing the hospital, looking up into the black emptiness. Ryan noticed that his hands were shaking, but he couldn’t will them to stop. He had seen many awful things in his life, far more than most, but knew that he would never forget the images that had confronted him through the choking dust after pulling Naomi out of the crushed van.
Now those terrible scenes reminded him of others, and he rushed to quickly push the thoughts from his mind. Searching frantically for something else to focus on, anything else, he found himself thinking about what he had overheard Katie saying earlier. My fiance… I’m looking for my fiance, Ryan Kealey.
They had never talked about marriage, and at first glance the idea seemed completely implausible. They had barely known each other six months, and he had never even met her family. Now that he thought about it, she had never mentioned them. In truth, though, he was more than ready to leave this life behind and start a family of his own. There had been women in the past, of course, but none that he cared about so much. If pressed, he wouldn’t have been able to say exactly why.
Although extremely intelligent, she was ruled by emotion, a fact that Ryan found both fascinating and a little overwhelming. There was nothing petty in Katie Donovan — for her, feeling decided what happened next; it was real, and could be trusted. Sometimes, the passion she exuded was almost frightening in its intensity. When she cared about something, she threw her whole heart into it. She had thrown her heart into him, he could see that now. For a woman who would jump on a plane and travel hundreds of miles to be by his side, Ryan thought he would give anything.
He walked back across long shadows in the street, to the woman he had saved and the woman who might yet save him.
CHAPTER 9
IRAN
The icy, intertwined limbs of the oak and conifer trees climbed high above the narrow side street running north from Niyavaran Park. The very highest points of the branches dangled heavily before yellow sodium lights that spilled down onto wet pavement shining in the cold drizzle. The light did not spread too far, as if it knew that the darkest corners of the city were best left to their own devices, alone and unrevealed.
Except for the hypnotic sound of the gentle rain, the streets of Tehran were silent as the night grew deep.
Ali Ahmedi, twenty-eight years old, six-year veteran of the Komiteh, the Iranian Secret Police, was hunched in the doorway of a dimly lit restaurant. The hood of his anorak was over his head, his breath steamed in the air. By his side, he held the Kalishnikov that could be bought for less than thirty American dollars in the markets at the city center. His weapon was better maintained than most, the bolt free of rust, with a light coat of oil. As soon as he was permitted, he would find a warm, comfortable place on the floor inside and clean the weapon again. Ahmedi took pride in his work, a deep pride that left little time for his wife and infant child. He was particularly pleased with his current assignment, despite the inclement weather. Across the street, a second guard was well concealed in a dark alley. The young officer counted himself fortunate; the alley had no overhead cover, and his friend would be well soaked by now.
Behind Ahmedi, past the grimy windows set in stout wooden frames, beyond the tables and chairs of rough- hewn oak, two men enjoyed a simple meal of lamb kebab and boiled rice.
A third guard drifted through the seating area in the foreground, an Uzi submachine gun slung carelessly across his chest. His eyes, though, were constantly moving over the dark shadows of the room, paying particular attention to the swinging door that led to the kitchen in the rear of the building. The two men and the guard; otherwise, the restaurant was empty.
Saif al-Adel pushed his plate away and leaned back in his chair, a contented expression settling over his narrow features. His face was almost feminine in appearance, with full lips, a long, straight nose, and pale, flawless skin pulled taut over high cheekbones. He took his time speaking, as was his custom; in the dangerous business that was his, one did not last by making rash comments or hasty decisions.
Hamza watched the man carefully. He was ever cautious of his fellow Egyptian’s volatile mood swings. They were difficult to catch; the signs could be as subtle as a small inclination of the head, a narrowing of the eyes. For Saif al-Adel, the word volatile held a different connotation than it did for the vast majority of humanity. Hamza had personally witnessed what the other man’s silent rage could lead to. Thinking about it now, he was brought back to an incident that had taken place nearly two years earlier…
The sands of the endless desert south of Kabul burned beneath the fiery orb above. Late in June of 2002, the morale within the organization was low, tempers flaring easily in the extreme temperatures that accompanied the rising and setting of the sun. The Afghans were afraid, and they tried to hide the fear with aggression and bluster. The fear could be attributed to the Americans, and to the MH-60 helicopters that would come low over the desert at night, and to the Special Forces soldiers that would fast-rope down to the desert floor below. Because of the fear, discipline was almost nonexistent in the flat expanse stretching in every direction. Young members of the organization congregated in large groups outside the caves, firing their weapons wildly into the air with complete disregard for the Western satellites that passed overhead. Hassan Hamza, while taking inventory of American Stinger missiles in the cool hollows of the stone outcropping, was drawn to the light outside by elevated voices.
Saif al-Adel, the recently installed commander of the military wing of Al-Qaeda, passed a small cluster of vociferous young volunteers. He heard the name of Muhammed Atef, his predecessor — until the day the Americans had come with their stolen coordinates and laser-guided bombs. He heard the sarcasm in the young voice, the snarled insults, and the derision that can be shown for the dead without fear of reprisal.
This is what Hamza saw: A junior member of the Taliban, maybe twenty years of age, held court at the center of a small group. His rifle was more than an arm’s length away, half-buried in the sand, forgotten by the soldier. The men surrounding him roared their approval at the vicious humor, laughed at his biting tongue, but al- Adel was ignored at the periphery of the group. His head was turning, the expression on his face did not change as he slipped the Makarov pistol free from his belt. Then the head of the young soldier was pulled back and to the right, the crowd scrambling away abruptly, startled shouts filling the air. The muzzle was jammed into the soft flesh beneath the jawbone, brown eyes wide in surprise as the trigger was squeezed, and the top of the boy’s head exploded up into the shimmering heat.
Saif al-Adel stood facing the stunned group of Taliban soldiers, the pistol loose in his right hand. There were armed men at his back, but he did not turn to track their movements. He was unafraid, and the statement had been
