The Camel Club

face drawn, the man looked terminally ill. He sipped on bottled water to alleviate the acid burning through his stomach, while his generals and admirals conversed with each other in low voices.

Decker left one of these groups and walked over to Hamilton. “Sir, I understand the enormity of your decision, but I want you to know that we have more than enough capability to do this.”

“I’m not worried about your hitting the damn city, Joe. I’m worried about what happens after that.”

“Syria has been aiding terrorists for a long time. Damascus is full of former Baathist heavyweights just biding their time before attempting a coup in Iraq. It’s well known that mosques in Damascus are recruiting stations for mujahideen. And Syrian militia are all over the Sunni Triangle in Iraq. It’s time we drew a hard line in the sand with them. It’s the same domino theory as spreading democracy in the Middle East by starting with Iraq. We make an example of the Syrians, then everyone else follows suit.”

“Yes, but what about the radiation fallout?” Hamilton asked.

“There will be some certainly. But where Damascus is situated, we believe that it will be somewhat contained.”

Hamilton finished his water and threw the bottle in the wastebasket. “Fallout somewhat contained. I’m glad you believe that, Joe.”

“Mr. President, you made the right decision. We could not allow this to happen without retaliation. That would empower these people to do even more. It has to stop. And deploying more troops would only stretch our military beyond the breaking point and allow the Syrians to successfully fight us guerrilla-style just like the Iraqis are doing. Besides, when they realize we’re not bluffing, they’ll release the president. We won’t have to launch.”

“I hope you’re right.” Hamilton stood and stared out the window. “How much time left?”

Decker instantly looked at his military aide.

“Six hours eleven minutes thirty-six seconds,” the aide promptly replied as he studied the laptop in front of him.

“Any more word from the Sharia Group?” Hamilton asked.

“Only that they don’t have the president,” Andrea Mayes said. The secretary of state came over and stood next to her boss. “And what if they’re telling the truth, Mr. President? What if they don’t have him? Maybe someone is trying to lay the blame on Syria in hopes that we’d do exactly as we are doing.”

Decker interjected, “I’ll grant you that even though authentication passwords are changed by Al Jazeera regularly, there is the possibility that someone else might have gotten access to it. But the person calling in the information had intimate details of the kidnapping that only the perpetrators would’ve known. Any terrorist organization that pulled off something like this would want the world to know. Historically, their strategy has never been to lay the responsibility off on another group. The only difference is the Sharia Group never expected us to use the nuclear card. That’s why they’re backtracking now and disclaiming culpability. The bastards have him, all right!”

Hamilton stared at Decker. “But if they don’t, and we level Damascus?” Hamilton shook his head, turned back around and stared into the darkness of an otherwise beautiful late summer night in Washington, D.C. From the streets of the city thousands of voices screamed back at him in protest. The chants of “No nukes” managed to pierce even the thick walls of the White House, as the citizens of the U.S. made their opinion very clear to their leadership. Yet once the nuclear threat had been made, it could not be withdrawn, Hamilton understood. Otherwise America’s trillion-dollar nuclear arsenal would instantly become worthless.

Instead of going to the White House and participating in what he considered a useless “death watch” for 6 million Syrians who were on the precipice of extinction, Carter Gray had remained at NIC headquarters. He stopped at Patrick Johnson’s empty cubicle and stared at the blank computer screen. Glitches and computer crashes. And presto, living, breathing terrorists were placed neatly into their digital graves. He sat in Johnson’s chair and surveyed the room. The picture of his fiancee, Anne Jeffries, was still on the desk. He picked it up and studied it. A nice-looking woman, Gray thought. She would find someone else to spend her life with. Johnson, from what he’d determined, was highly competent at his job but possessed the personality of a slug. He had certainly not concocted this scheme. It truly was an unbelievable thought, Gray mused. Someone at America’s premier intelligence agency had orchestrated the use of a group of supposedly dead Muslims to kidnap the president of the United States. And now the world was on the brink of global jihad.

Gray had had the databases checked thoroughly. There were no electronic tracks showing who might have altered the files. That was not surprising, considering Johnson’s expertise and the fact that he helped create the database and spent his days troubleshooting the system. He well knew how to hide what he’d done. Yet who got him to do it in the first place and paid him well, judging by his expensive home and cars? And Gray pondered something else. Where was the president? It had to be somewhere relatively close by. Despite what he’d said to Hamilton on the subject, Gray did not believe for one moment that James Brennan was in Medina, Saudi Arabia. No Muslim would take a Christian there.

He thought back to the day Jackie Simpson and that other agent came to NIC. They were accompanied by two of his men. Reynolds? No, Reinke. The tall, lean one. The other one was shorter and thicker. Peters. That’s right. Hemingway told him that they’d been assigned to look into the Johnson homicide. Gray picked up a phone and asked for the whereabouts of these two agents. The answer was surprising. They had not reported for duty tonight. He made another query. This surprised him even more, and then he wondered why he hadn’t asked that particular question before now.

Gray was told that Tom Hemingway had assigned the pair to investigate the death of Patrick Johnson. At least Gray knew where Hemingway was. He’d been dispatched to the Middle East under deep cover soon after the kidnapping to see what he could find out. Hemingway had volunteered for the mission. Yet, there was no way to communicate with him. They had to wait for him to contact them. Wait for him to contact them.

Gray put his hand in the biometric reader on Johnson’s desk, instantly giving him access to the dead man’s computer. Gray typed in a command and the result was very swift. Tom Hemingway had accessed Johnson’s computer. When Gray looked at the time stamp of when this occurred, he concluded it was when Hemingway met with Simpson and Alex. And yet something puzzled Gray greatly. Hemingway was not supposed to have access to Johnson’s computer, or any of the other data supervisors’.

Gray slowly rose from the chair. He was too old for this job. He was not up to it anymore. The truth had been dancing in front of his eyes this whole time. Gray’s next question was an obvious one. Where? The answer to that query came almost immediately.

Gray picked up the phone again and ordered his chopper readied immediately and then called up a team of his most loyal field operatives. He bolted from Johnson’s office and jogged down the halls of NIC.

Gray didn’t need fancy databases to guide him to the truth. His gut was screaming the answer at him, and his gut had rarely led him down the wrong path.

CHAPTER

64

THEY WERE IN ALEX’S CROWN Vic heading southwest on Route 29. Alex and Stone were in the front while Simpson and Reuben rode in the back. Alex glanced sideways at his companion. Here the Secret Service agent was, heading toward a possible showdown with a man who masterminded the kidnapping of a United States president. His “rescue team” consisted of a rookie Secret Service agent and a big guy pushing sixty whom Adelphia called Shifty Pants. And then there was the man named Oliver Stone, who worked in a cemetery, leading them all to a place called Murder Mountain. And to top it off, if they failed, the world might very well be toast. Alex sighed. We’re all dead.

About thirty-five minutes after they’d branched off from Route 29 onto Highway 211, they entered the small town of Washington, Virginia, the seat of Rappahannock County. From there, Stone gave intricate instructions and they rose into the mountains, soon leaving any semblance of civilization behind as asphalt roads turned to gravel and then to dirt. It was difficult to believe they were a little over two hours away from the nation’s capital and not that far east of the confluence of busy Interstates 81 and 66.