Rising from his chair, Harry moved across the darkened room, punching a gloved fist through the drywall. His fingers closed around a thin wire.
Circling the room, he came up against the opposite wall and retrieved the other parabolic mike, disabling it in similar fashion. The bugs were dead.
“What is he doing?” Shoham wondered aloud, watching the scene live on the TV screen in the Mossad operations room.
Gideon leaned forward. “I can take my team in.”
“No,” the general replied, shaking his head. “We gain nothing by direct action. Let Nichols run his course.”
The next minute, their TV screen went black as someone draped a jacket over the camera lens.
“Move to my chair,” Harry instructed, returning to the table. “Sit with your back to the glass.”
“Why?”
“With that camera dead, they’re going to move next door. I don’t want them to be able to read your lips.”
“Who are you?”
Harry turned back to the table, his gun hand resting on his hip, near the holstered.45. Time was running short. He stared at Tal, not bothering to respond to the question. “Talk.”
“Thank you for coming in early, Director,” President Hancock said, looking up from his desk as a pair of Secret Service agents ushered David Lay into the Oval Office. “It is the imperatives of the campaign season, you understand.”
“To be sure,” Lay responded, acknowledging the presence of Lawrence Bell with a brief nod. “Missouri today?”
Hancock nodded. “Air Force One departs from Andrews at seven o’clock.”
Preliminaries out of the way, the DCIA opened the folder in front of him. “First on the agenda is the Eilat situation.”
“So I saw,” Hancock nodded, a biting edge to his voice. “I’m sure you understand, David, that this is one of my concerns with these so-called ‘deniable’ operations. They have a way of ending up on CNN.”
Lay bit his tongue. “There was a leak.”
“Isn’t there always,” came the President’s irony-laced rejoinder. “How many people did we lose?”
“None. A couple from Savannah were in the crowd and killed in the blast, but other than that collateral damage, no one. Our operations personnel extracted safely.”
The President paled. “Collateral damage? Dear God, David, do you realize how cold you sound?”
Lay briefly looked at the ceiling of the Oval Office, sighing heavily. “That’s the spy business, Mr. President. People get hurt. People get killed. We’re busy tracking down the leaked information as we speak.”
“Do the Israelis know about the biological weapon?” Hancock asked, a sudden intensity creeping into his voice.
“No,” Lay replied, looking surprised. “You gave orders to that effect, and they have not been contravened.”
“Good.” Hancock sank back into his chair. “See that they aren’t…”
After Moshe Tal finished talking, silence reigned in the interrogation room for the space of about two minutes.
Harry sat there, silently regarding the archaeologist as he processed the information he had been given. None of it was recorded, unless Ron Carter’s intel had been bad and there was a device he had missed. He had taken no notes. Everything was committed to memory.
Taken all together, Tal’s information tallied with the intelligence the CIA had gotten from the debrief of the rest of the team. The pneumonic plague had been contained in the mass grave of the Persian city, lying dormant over the centuries until its release by the archaeologist’s dig. Opening Pandora’s grave, to speak of it figuratively.
He stood, turning toward the door as if to leave. “What about the others?” Tal asked, a plaintive note in his voice.
“What?”
“You promised. Who lived?”
Harry turned back, leaning across the table until his face was only inches from that of the archaeologist. “They all did,” he whispered, his lips barely moving. “And if you want to keep it that way, you need to do exactly as I say.”
The expression on Tal’s face was a curious blend of surprise and relief, mingled with an overwhelming fear. “What?” he asked, his hands trembling uncontrollably.
“Tell anyone what you’ve told me and your friends die. And if anyone asks, you told me nothing. Can you remember this?”
The professor nodded mutely. Harry walked over and lifted his jacket from over the lens of the surveillance camera. “Good. Your friends are depending on you.”
And then he was gone, opening the door and disappearing into the corridor. Shoham was waiting outside…
The rain had come. First in huge droplets, heavy orbs of water splashing down from on high. Then steady rain, soaking their garments. Finally wind-driven sheets of water, falling from an ink-black sky. Lightning lit the scene as the riders pressed on, mounts splashing through pools of standing water.
Thomas bent low over the neck of the stallion, urging him forward against the fury of the storm, endeavoring to keep pace with the girl on his right.
“How much farther?” he called out. For a minute, he thought she hadn’t heard him, his words whipped away in the teeth of the wind. Then, her hand flew out, three outstretched fingers giving him his answer. Three kilometers.
“So, that’s all you were able to get out of Tal?” General Shoham asked, glancing up from his notes.
“Yes,” Harry replied, lying easily. “Nothing actionable, unfortunately. His best guess is that his communication with the Ayatollah was hacked.”
“What of the lab trailers?”
Harry turned to meet Gideon’s question. “He and the team were isolated following their arrest. He wasn’t
