Remington didn’t have firsthand knowledge of that. He’d never been around women who cared that much, or even claimed to have cared that much. Keeping letters and cards was something the woman Goose had married would do. The gesture was romantic, but that also meant she was clingy—a real problem, to Remington’s way of thinking.
A career military man didn’t have any business being with a clingy woman. Even Goose’s standards and goals had changed since his marriage. He’d lost some of his game and some of his edge, had a tendency to think about things more completely now, seeing the whole picture instead of just focusing on the mission like an enlisted man worth his salt should.
“So where did Icarus come from?” Remington asked.
“We don’t know that yet, sir. Agent Cody believes that most of the guys we use in the Middle East are Syrians. Or other Middle Eastern guys the Syrians have bought out. Or are just believers. Jihad, you know. Guys who figure fighting the holy war against Christianity and the Western powers is in their blood.”
Remington paced for a moment again, turning everything over in his mind, searching for the angles that would pop the story into pieces and expose any lies Winters had told. But there were no weak places. Despite the lack of physical evidence, the story was convincing.
“I saw real-time video of the takedown when my Rangers rescued Icarus.” Remington remembered the scene vividly. A copy of the opstill existed on VCD in his personal files. “Icarus was badly beaten. Looked like he was lucky to live through it.”
“For a man next to death’s door, he’s getting around pretty good, don’t you think? We haven’t caught him yet.”
“Why would the PKK want to kill him?”
“Because we leaked information he was a CIA plant,” Winters explained.
OneWorld NewsNet Corporate Offices
Bucharest, Romania
Local Time 0617 Hours
Lizuca Carutasu hummed as she worked. She liked American pop tunes, and the one she hummed now had hit the Top Forty on morning-drive stations in America. She knew that because she listened to the radio through the Internet.
Lizuca was twenty-three years old, a slim-hipped brunette with hopes of seeing America at some point. She’d studied the movies, which was how she had improved her English, and bought Western clothes, which were still frowned upon by her mother, who was very much a traditionalist. Oldest of her four sisters, she was also considered the rabble-rouser by her mother because Lizuca had no interest in simply marrying a man in order to get a house and raise children the way it was done before the people rose from the streets and took back their country from the despot Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989.
Not having been alive during those times, Lizuca knew little of how desperate simply surviving had been, but she imagined that life had been hard. What she could not know of the executions and mass murders and food lines, she heard about from her mother and her aunts.
Sitting at the desk near the eastern wall of the tall and imposing building that housed OneWorld NewsNet on the top three floors, Lizuca had a good view of the city and Cotroceni Palace, which was now the presidential residency and a museum. She loved the glass porch with its stained-glass windows. One of her favorite places to visit while shopping in City Centre was the botanical gardens.
Shopping. The thought pleased her. The overtime Danielle offered for her research assignment—even though the man was evil-faced and would no doubt cause nightmares for her if he’d done something
truly atrocious, which he had to have done because those were the people news stories were done about, yes?—would surely buy the new dress she’d been looking at for the last few weeks in the shopkeeper’s window.
Even this early in the morning, the office buzzed with activity and the strong smell of coffee.
Lizuca had a small desk, but she shared it with no one else. When she left her shift, no one sat in her chair or moved her things around.
Files and supplies stayed exactly where she left them. Provided she locked the drawers, of course. Other people in the office shared their work space with second shifts.
As she sat in her chair and watched the computer search the video archives for the picture of the man Danielle had sent her, she pinched off another piece of the cheese pastry her mother had baked last night and sent with her for breakfast.
Lizuca would have preferred going out for breakfast before returning home, but her mother watched her spending habits with a miser’s eye. Her mother didn’t consider the money Lizuca made to be her own but rather the family’s. Lizuca was the only one with a good-paying job.
With all the disappearances around the world, so many of them in Romania as well, Lizuca didn’t feel like arguing with her mother. She was glad that her family remained intact. Her father had died nine years ago, and things had been especially hard for them even though freedom fighters had removed the Communist government.
The blue bar graph indicating the amount of video library covered moved slowly, ticking off completed percentile points.
Lizuca considered trying the home number she had for Mrs. Samuel Adams Gander again, thinking perhaps with everything that was going on in America—all the unrest and accidents—that it might not be too late to call.
“Miss Carutasu.”
Startled by the low, menacing voice, Lizuca turned in her seat and saw Radu Stolojan standing behind her.
He was tall and powerful-looking in his habitual black suit. He wore his curly hair in a short crop, like the Greeks. Despite the fact that he worked primarily daylight hours, his pale skin showed no tan,
