deliver you to Arnold’s computer.”
“I told him you. He knows you. He’ll believe that.”
“Maybe,” he allowed.
Sabrina had more confidence. “All of this hinges on the bluff. If he believes that I’m doing this for the money, then he has to believe I’ve kept our contact secret. Since the government isn’t expecting him, there would be no reason to send me with a troop of spooks to Arnold’s cabin. One actually sounds more plausible.”
Quinlan nodded. “Plus, if he’s smart, he’ll check the area upon his arrival and find nothing. No traps, no ambush. That will work to our advantage, as well.”
“And leave us completely exposed.”
He met her eyes. “Worried I’ll miss?”
“No. You know what they say…fourth time is a charm. What did Krueger say?”
“Before or after the shouting?”
“Either.”
“He’s sending reinforcements, but it will take them time before they get here. Let’s move.”
“Sir, you have a message.” The driver had lowered the partition between the front and back seats. He held a cell phone up and Kahsan leaned forward to take it.
“You don’t mind if I take this, do you?” he asked his fellow passenger. Since the question was rhetorical he took the phone and read the text message that was appearing on the small monitor. He was forced to scroll it a few times before he understood the coded message. Then he cleared it and put in a set of coordinates. He passed the phone back through the partition.
“Plug those coordinates into the GPS and get us to that location immediately.”
“Yes, sir.”
The partition slid back into place and Kahsan leaned back in the deep leather cushions. He smiled serenely at his guest. “Well, you’ll be happy to know everything is going according to plan. My dear friend Ms. Masters is cooperating as expected and for an added bonus we’ll be running into an old rival of mine. It will be good to see Mr. Quinlan again. A shame I’ll have to kill him immediately after that, but it can’t be helped.”
The passenger said nothing.
Kahsan sighed, enjoying the softness of the cashmere sweater his man had purchased for him. Winter, it seemed, could be survived in tolerable comfort with the right sort of clothing. He closed his eyes, confident that his passenger would not see it as a slight, and thought about how close he was to securing the data that would deliver to him a ready-made army. One that merely needed to be pointed in the right direction.
For the right price, of course.
There were times that Kahsan wished he’d been blessed with the sort of feverish belief system his half brother had. Considering Kahsan’s superior intellect, who knew what he might have accomplished if he’d been endowed with conviction? Then again, not having a belief system of any kind made things much easier. He didn’t care when the cause he was working for won. He didn’t care when it lost.
Money was his only passion.
What had begun as a family obligation had led to the lucrative career he had today. His half brother, a legitimate prince, had joined a fundamentalist group that stood against the evil Western world. The group had chosen a French embassy in Africa to destroy. A ludicrous choice in Kahsan’s estimation, but a safe one, he imagined.
Their problem had been they had absolutely no knowledge of how to go about accomplishing such a task. That’s when he’d been asked, or rather ordered, by his brother to work with the group. Given his special talent for strategizing, devising a plan had been relatively simple. In return for delivering the plan, all he’d asked was to be paid. His brother, to whom money was only so much paper, agreed to the tune of half a million dollars.
Easy money.
From there, the next step was to seek out other groups who had the funding, but not the education, to blow things up. It didn’t matter who he killed. All that mattered was that he was paid and that at the end of the day he lived…so he could be paid again. But with security tightening as it had in the past few months, it was getting harder and harder to pull off finesse jobs. The job in Milan had been a little on the crude side. Suicide bombers, after all, were so cliche, but they were effective.
And it was so easy to find radicals who didn’t mind offering up their bodies for the cause. That’s why he was here now. The lure of all those motivated, self-sacrificing men he could command already situated inside the United States was too great an opportunity to pass up. With such an army at his disposal, the cost of his services would be astronomical.
He could almost count the money. And then, because it was so much money that he lost count, he chuckled to himself.
It turned out that Sabrina and Quinlan were close enough to the rendezvous point that they could walk. Quinlan took the lead and they made their way through the quaint town, hand in hand like a couple of tourists.
Quinlan led her down a road lined with a smattering of homes. The ones closer to the main street in town were pretty and well kept. The farther away they got, the houses got smaller and meaner looking. After the last house-a one-story bungalow that didn’t look as if it could sustain life-they came upon a dirt path that took them through the woods down an embankment. Finally, the path opened up to what turned out to be a small dock that jutted into the Susquehanna River.
Ninety-seven yards beyond the dock sat an island, which was no bigger than a high school football field. It was covered with foliage and enough evergreens to conceal what Sabrina imagined would be a small log cabin.
“Arnold lived there,” she said, feeling an overwhelming sense of isolation. Even knowing he’d chosen that life, it still astounded her. “How did he stand it?”
“He liked it,” Quinlan assured her. “It was like having a private world all to himself.”
He was right. And that would have appealed to Arnold. For the most part he hated people. He hated having to explain himself. The only reason he had agreed to work with her at Langley was because she understood him on one level, but it had taken months before he truly accepted her. She thought about him living what turned out to be the rest of his life in that cabin and suddenly she wished she had e-mailed him more often.
“I take it the boats are the only way on to the island, that it doesn’t connect to land on the other side.”
“The boats are the only way out there,” Quinlan confirmed. “Unless you want to swim, which I don’t recommend given the temperature of the water.”
There were two boats. A small motorboat that was anchored to one side of the dock and a rowboat that bobbed in the water on the other side. Other than the narrow path they had just descended there was only one way in, a dirt road that must be an offshoot of the main street.
“Only one way in. Pretty convenient,” Sabrina mused.
“Unless, Kahsan comes by water. But that’s assuming he knows he’s looking for an island.”
“I didn’t mention the island. I just gave him the coordinates you gave me.”
“Then we have to assume he’ll come down that road.”
She watched as Quinlan scouted the area, his trained eyes searching for the perfect spot to lie in wait. Trees surrounded them on the hill, but in the dead of winter with no leaves for coverage, there weren’t many that would hide a man his size.
“I have an idea,” she announced.
He turned back to her and waited for her to reveal it.
“It’s going to require you trusting me,” she told him.
He said nothing, but simply shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s not a yes, is it?”
“It’s more like I don’t really have a choice.”
Sabrina figured that was the best he was going to do. Still it made her sad. “I wish I knew when it happened,” she said thoughtfully.
“When what happened?”
She picked up a stick in front of her to give her something to do other than look at him. She tossed it into the river.
“When you became so cynical,” she answered.
He shook his head, then his eyes met hers and he pinned her with his gaze. As if he was daring her to look
