distorted their figures as they marched away under a merciless sun that baked the tarmac like pottery in a kiln.
Carleton noted the brandnew mural decorating the wall behind the podium — a stylistic rendition of a map of Saudi Arabia, its flag, and a verse from the Koran. It hadn’t been there on his last visit to Riyadh. The Saudis must be sprucing up their airport — yet again. He shrugged mentally. His hosts always seemed to have the money for bold and lavish interior decorating. Now it was his job to persuade them to move boldly in other, more important areas — to continue the process of making a full peace with Israel.
He looked down at the notes of his prepared arrival remarks.
His words would be carefully chosen and indirect, as was usual when dealing with sensitive political issues in Arab countries.
But they would leave his real audience, the ruling Saudi elite, in no doubt that the United States was committed to yet another serious and sustained effort to reconcile Jerusalem and its Arab neighbors.
Carleton cleared his throat, looked straight up into the unwinking lenses of the dozen or so television cameras assembled to record his statement, and opened his mouth — The mural behind him erupted in flame.
The fiery blast enveloped Carleton a millisecond before the fragments thrown by the explosion tore him to pieces and then sleeted outward-killing or maiming dozens of the aides, security guards, and reporters clumped near the podium.
Two rooms away, Yassir Iyad, an airport maintenance worker, felt and heard the short, sharp concussive thump that told him the explosive charge planted inside the new mural by the Radical Islamic Front had detonated. He smiled broadly and then wiped the smile off his face.
Working swiftly, the young Palestinian guest worker detached a small controller from the piece of wire hanging out of an electrical conduit inspection plate. He concealed the controller in his pocket. Next, he tugged on the wire — pulling it out through the conduit. Since the wire had only been attached to the bomb’s trigger mechanism, it came out easily. If it had hung up on the wreckage, Iyad had come prepared to cut it off and conceal it in place. Fortunately, that wasn’t necessary.
Instead, the Palestinian simply reeled the wire in — all twenty meters of it — gathering it up on the same spool it had come from.
Then he clipped off the scorched, twisted end and dropped that in his pocket beside the controller. He planned to drop both pieces of incriminating evidence somewhere deep in the desert outside the Saudi capital.
After replacing the access plate, Iyad left the storage room — locking the door behind him.
Then, donning a look of anguished concern like a mask, the Palestinian hurried, along with everyone else, toward the scene of the tragedy.
“Officials have characterized this as the most serious terrorist attack on the United States in two years — pointing out that Undersecretary of State Carleton is the highest-ranking U.S. official ever assassinated on foreign soil. The White House is preparing a statement … Prince Ibrahim al Saud snapped the television off. A slight smile graced his lips. Carleton’s death was only a fraction of what he hoped to accomplish, of what he planned to accomplish but the Americans had suffered today.
The MVD holding area at Sheremetevo-1 showed signs of hard usage. Its black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor was scarred, scuffed, and still showed mud and other stains tracked in during the last spring rainstorm. Several of the overhead fluorescent lamps were burned out, and some of those that were left flickered at irregular intervals.
Puke-ugly, lime-green plastic chairs bolted around the walls provided the room’s only seating.
Colonel Peter Thorn sat stiffly upright in one of those hard plastic seats, studiously ignoring the young MVD private standing nearby. The kid looked barely old enough to shave, and Thorn earnestly hoped he’d been given enough training to know how to work the safety on the AKSU submachine gun he held cradled in both hands. From the way the private twitched whenever Thorn so much as shifted in his chair, he seemed to think he was guarding Bonnie and Clyde.
Thorn looked across to where Helen Gray sat. Another soldier stood watching her, and a burly, hardfaced MVD captain occupied the chair right next to hers.
She looked pensive, sad, and utterly weary. There were shadows under her blue eyes — shadows that had darkened in the two days since Alexei Koniev had died.
He sighed inaudibly. Losing a partner was one of the toughest things that could ever happen to anyone in law enforcement or the Special Forces. It was something you never really got over.
He knew that only too well. One of his closest friends, his old sergeant major, had been killed in the Delta Force raid on Teheran. He still had occasional nightmares about that — nightmares that lingered on in a sadness that was hard to shake when he woke up.
Thorn shook his head somberly. This investigation had already exacted a bitter price from the woman he loved — and they still weren’t much closer to the truth they’d been seeking. He leaned toward her, hoping he could find the right words to tell her how sorry he was. “Helen, I—”
“Silence!” the MVD captain barked in heavily accented English.
“No talking! It is forbidden.”
Thorn bit down on a savage curse. Damn it. This was ridiculous.
He rubbed angrily at his wrists, fiercely massaging the abrasions left by handcuffs that had been locked down too tight for too long.
He hadn’t been very surprised when the first militia units arriving on the scene at the Star of the White Sea put them under arrest. That had been a reasonable precaution for any policeman faced with a shipload of corpses and two armed foreigners. But what followed next hadn’t been reasonable. Not by a long shot.
They’d been held under lock and key at the Pechenga militia headquarters for hours, denied any contact with the American embassy, and ignored whenever they demanded information on the state of the investigation down at the docks. When this MVD captain and his men showed up earlier today, Thorn had at first thought the wheels of Russia’s ponderous bureaucracy were finally starting to spin in the right direction.
Big mistake, boyo, he thought bitterly. If anything, their situation had gone from bad to worse. He and Helen had been hustled out of militia custody, handcuffed like common criminals, and plopped onto a military transport plane bound for Moscow.
And now they’d been left sitting in this dingy, godforsaken waiting room for more than two hours. He grimaced. What kind of game was the MVD playing here? Somebody, probably that smug son of a bitch Serov, had set the three of them up, and every minute that passed gave whoever it was more time to either cover his tracks or vanish.
Thorn swiveled slightly in his chair as the door to the holding area swung open.
A young man cautiously poked his head through the opening.
Wary brown eyes blinked owlishly behind his horn-rim glasses.
“Captain Dobuzhinsky?”
“Da.” The MVD captain lumbered to his feet. “You are from the American embassy?”
“Yes.” The young man nodded rapidly. He strode forward. “My name is Andrew Wyatt. I’m with the administrative affairs section.”’ It was about time the pinstriped cavalry rode over the ridge, Thorn thought sourly.
Wyatt turned toward them. “Special Agent Gray? Colonel Thorn? I’ve been sent to bring you back to the embassy.” He glanced at the MVD officer. “I assume that’s all right, Captain?”
Dobuzhinsky nodded dourly. “First, you must sign for them.”
The captain held out a clipboard and watched impassively while the young embassy staffer hurriedly read through the official form attached to it — moving his lips as he sounded out some of the Russian legal jargon.
Once Wyatt scrawled his signature across the bottom of the form, the MVD officer uncuffed them — first Helen and then Thorn. He scowled at them and then nodded abruptly toward the door. “Very well. You are free to leave. But only to go with this man from your embassy. Nowhere else. You understand?”
Thorn restrained his anger until they were outside the terminal and on their way to the embassy car waiting at the curb for them. Then he swung around on Wyatt. “What the hell is wrong with the Russians? First, we’re
