Lily crashed back in her seat. She picked up her hat and used it to wipe the sweat from her brow. Lukacs was moaning from the floor.
“You bastards.” He was shaking and drooling blood. “You cannot do this! I am a foreign national. You have no authority!”
“Authority?” Lily laughed and jammed a heel in his buttocks as Scott and Chilly cuffed him hand and foot. “We don’t need no stinking authority.”
Hot Shot gunned it straight out of town.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
It was a cold, misty midnight in Boston. The ceiling in Zeta’s War Room glowed with a languid blue sky, winging black geese, and wispy white clouds, but it wasn’t fooling a soul. The long boardroom table was strewn with Chinese food cartons, ravaged microwave dinners, Styrofoam coffee cups, and crushed Red Bull cans, and there wasn’t an empty seat to be had.
Diana Bloch had the helm, with Paul Kirby hunched at her right elbow, and General Margolis at her left. Kirby’s thin hair was finger-comb crazy while Margolis still looked like he’d just arrived from a ball. The general’s adjutants, both captains, sat quietly plucking at tablets while Shepard and Karen hunched over pairs of humming laptops.
Across from them, Morgan and Conley sat side by side, perhaps no longer the pictures of youth they’d been way back when but intensely focused nonetheless. And the rest of the chairs were occupied by Diana’s young analysts and interns, who all knew better than to utter a word.
“Bring her up,” Diana said to Shepard. He nodded and tapped.
The wall-length monitor behind Morgan and Conley came to life, so they both swung around in their chairs. The screen filled with the image of Lily, waist up, with nothing behind her but a shabby curtain. A series of zeros popped up in the right-hand corner and started ticking off numbers. This was Zeta’s version of Skype—secure and always recorded.
“Welcome to the witching hour,” Lily said. For an operative who’d recently been through hell, she looked very relaxed.
“What’s your location?” Diana asked.
“Safe house,” Lily said.
“Where?” Kirby asked.
“If I tell you,” Lily said with a smirk, “it’s no longer safe.”
“Brief it,” Diana ordered as she bridled a bit at Lily’s tone. The girl was obviously feeling smug.
“Hold on to your proverbial hats,” said Lily. “It appears that Mr. Enver Lukacs is the linchpin. He put General Collins together with Colonel Hyo and those lovely North Koreans.”
General Margolis leaned over to his nearest captain and murmured, “Make sure you’re getting all this. That’s a UCMJ life sentence right there.” He meant Uniform Code of Military Justice.
“Lukacs is the middle man,” Lily went on. “Taking a cut from the DPRK payments to Collins. Apparently, Collins plans to execute his mission and then bugger off and retire to a little place in the Alps. Seems the general was miffed about something, and Lukacs found out.”
“We passed him over for his second star,” Margolis growled. “Bastard didn’t deserve it with all the crap he pulled in Iraq.”
“Lily,” Diana said. “This is General Margolis.”
“A pleasure, sir.” She could see everyone in the War Room.
“Get to Collins’s objective,” Diana said.
“It’s a nightmare,” said Lily. “Collins set up the Tomahawk heist for Hyo’s men, eighteen of whom are here. Sleepers, and they’ve been in the States for a year.”
Morgan was counting on his fingers all the Koreans he’d already killed, and he needed both hands. “Should be only eleven by now,” he said. Conley looked at him as if he was bragging. Morgan just shrugged.
“Go on, Lily,” Diana snapped impatiently.
She did. “Six missiles were hijacked. I believe Morgan found three.”
“Correct,” Kirby said. “Those have been recovered by the FBI’s HRT and secured by the army.”
“Well, that leaves them with three,” Lily said. “Their plan is to take over a nuclear storage facility, probably somewhere on the eastern seaboard. But that might be a feint. Lukacs doesn’t know where.”
“Are you sure about that?” Kirby asked.
“Believe me, he doesn’t know,” Lily affirmed. Shepard and Karen glanced at each other. “Furthermore, they’re going to bring the Tomahawks in there.”
“What’s the point of that?” Margolis wondered as he loosened his tie. “If they intend to destroy the facility, you can’t just detonate a Tomahawk warhead. It has to be in flight, with the gyros already spun up for it to be armed.”
“General.” Lily turned her gaze on him. “How does one target a Tomahawk?”
“You have to have the launch codes,” he growled impatiently. “And then you feed it the target’s coordinates.”
“Utilizing GPS?”
“That is correct.”
“So, then, can one target oneself?” Lily asked.
Margolis blinked. “What the hell do you mean?”
“I mean, General, that they bring the missiles into the facility, launch them, and leave in all good haste. The code name of Collins’s hellish little gambit is ‘Boomerang. ’ Are we all on the same page now?”
Margolis’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my Lord.”
“If only he were available,” Lily said. “But I believe he’s on sabbatical. At any rate, that’s all I have.” Then she raised a finger. “Wait, one thing more. The point of all this is to false flag the whole thing as a North Korean attack. Apparently, Colonel Hyo has also gone rogue.”
“Jesus,” Conley hissed. “Those goons are bad enough when they’re straight.”
“Lily, you’ve done superbly well,” said Diana. She was touching her chest, where her heart rate was up and thumping. “How did you ever get all this from Lukacs?”
“Ms. Bloch,” Lily said sardonically. “Don’t ask.”
Diana nodded. She didn’t really want to ask Lily how many fingers Lukacs had left. “All right,” she said. “Hold your position and stand by.”
Lily issued a two-fingered Boy Scout salute, and the monitor went black. Diana turned to Margolis. “General, your assessment?”
Margolis rubbed his jaw. “Well, operational nukes are stored on WS Three—that’s Weapons Storage and Security System. It’s a structure of electronic controls and vaults, built into protective aircraft shelters for strategic bombers or ICBMs. Similar arrangement for nuclear subs.”
“How many such locations are
