He got up from his seat on the couch and crossed over to the window, gazing out over the city, over the Potomac to Washington, D.C. His nation’s capital.
The capital of the land he had sworn to defend. No matter what the cost.
Over the fifteen years he had worked for the CIA, he had learned the cost. All too well. The cost of missions gone wrong, the price of failure. The bittersweet taste of victory when it had been achieved with the blood of his friends, his comrades.
To look at him, one would have never suspected who he was, what his job entailed. He stood about six-foot three, his frame deceptively lean. The build of a runner, not a weightlifter, though he did both. There was little about his physique to hint of the tightly controlled violence he was so capable of unleashing.
Clear blue eyes smiled disarmingly from a smooth-shaven face that had been long weathered by the elements, the smile so often nothing more than a facade to conceal the man that lay beneath. A cover, like so much of the rest of his life. He had sacrificed much to serve his country.
His hair was black and wavy, parted neatly to one side. To look at him, dressed as he was in a blue suit jacket, matching pants and a white shirt, one would have guessed him to be nothing more than a business executive, or perhaps one of Langley’s many analysts. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.
A Colt 1911.45 automatic was beneath the jacket, carried fully loaded in a paddle holster on his hip, even here on the seventh floor of the CIA. He rarely went without it.
The door opened behind him. A woman’s voice. “The director will see you now.”
He turned, a smile passing across his face. “Thank you, Margaret.”
“Go on in.”
Director Lay glanced up from his computer as Harry entered. In his early sixties, Lay was a big man, carrying the weight of someone who had spent most of their career behind a desk. Which he had, but no one would have called the desk of DCIA easy or stress-free. His graying hair was testimony to that fact.
“Have a seat,” he instructed. “I’m glad you could get here so quickly. I understand you’ve been trying to catch up on sleep since your arrival from Mexico City last night.”
Harry shrugged, taking a chair in front of the desk. “Kinda had to catch the red-eye back. Understood something hot was on tap.”
“There is. Good work with Calderon, Nichols,” the director said abruptly. That was all he said about the three dangerous months that had led up to the assassination of the drug lord. That was all that would ever be said. Silence was golden. “I trust you’ve had lunch?”
“I grabbed a quick bite in the Operations Center cafeteria.”
“Good. This will take a while.”
“What’s going on?”
Lay handed him a thin folder. “Recognize this man?”
Harry flipped the folder open and briefly studied the 8x10 photo inside. “Moshe Tal,” he announced calmly, his voice betraying none of his inner confusion. “Israel’s foremost archaeologist.”
“You know him?”
“By reputation only. A modern-day Indiana Jones, so they say.”
“Whoever ‘they’ are, they’re right. He’s a cowboy.”
“So I’ve heard. Not too much regard for the conventions of the business. Where’s he fit into this picture?”
The CIA director snorted. “He
“Excuse me, sir,” Harry interrupted. “They allowed an
“It’s already sounding rather strange, isn’t it?”
“You’d better believe it. How large of a team does Dr. Tal have with him?”
“The team was very small. That’s another one of his trademarks. Fifteen in all including Dr. Tal, thirteen Americans and an Australian woman named Rachel Eliot.”
“No other Israelis?”
A grim smile creased the director’s face. “They obeyed their government’s injunction to stay out of Iran.”
“Our citizens didn’t? Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Because they usually don’t.”
“Wait a minute, director,” Harry said, suddenly holding up his hand. “You said the team
Director Lay opened his desk drawer and took out another folder, handing it across. “That’s why you’re here. They’ve disappeared.”
Harry’s only reaction was raised eyebrows. “Indeed.”
“They disappeared five days ago,” the director nodded. “The whole team. Every last one of them. It’s all in the folder there. Every blessed thing we know about it.”
Harry opened the folder, taking out a couple of glossy photographs, clearly enhanced from a satellite.
“The first one is from the 13th. Because of the number of Americans in the team, we were doing a daily satellite overpass of the camp. Just to make sure nothing happened to them.”
“But something did.”
Lay nodded. “Correct. The first photograph, digitally enhanced from the KH-13 overpass, shows a bustling camp,” he noted, referencing the Key Hole spy satellite. “Almost everyone is present in the photo. One of the Americans, Joel Mullins, is missing, but on thermal scan, we picked up a heat signature from inside one of the tents.”
“So, he was probably inside.”
“Likely. Now take a look at the second photo, taken on the 14th. What do you see?”
“Nothing,” Harry said slowly. “No people, no tents, nothing. It’s all gone.” He looked up. “It’s been five days now. Anything?”
“Yes.” The DCIA pulled a third photograph from his desk and handed it over. “Take a look at this.”
Harry did as he was told. His eyes opened wide. “What on earth are
“That’s what I need you to find out.”
“Cut that out!” Thomas Parker spluttered, waking up abruptly from his nap as water splashed over him.
The thirty-six-year-old New York native looked up at the young woman standing over him, at the now empty bucket in her hands, water dripping suspiciously from its rim. Mischief glinted in her dark eyes. She made a quick motion as though to toss it at him, giggling uncontrollably as he rolled off the blanket into the sand.
“I said, cut it out, Julie!” he protested, the sand sticking to his wet chest.
“Are you going to make me?” she laughed, dancing away from him as he grabbed for her ankle.
He leaned back, slicking his wet brown hair back from his forehead, gazing up at his girlfriend. “No, probably not. But sooner or later-” he shook his finger at her. “You’ll see.”
“I’ll see what?”
At that moment, his cellphone rang and whatever his reply might have been was forever lost as he reached for it. Words were blinking on-screen: SECURE CONNECTION. It had to be Kranemeyer. And that didn’t bode well for his plans for the evening. He stood and glanced over at Julie.
“This is private,” he warned her, rapidly tapping in the code sequence for the encrypted line.
“What is it, another girlfriend?” she demanded, watching his face closely.
