six-second fuse and a casualty radius of thirty yards or more. They also knew the chemical ignited upon contact with air and instantaneously reached a temperature of three thousand degrees, enough to burn through steel armor.
An aide, who’d been standing just behind the ambassador, had the large pitcher of water from the podium and was approaching Merriman. Zachary and Duncan were frozen in place, watching in horror at the sight of their father writhing on the ground, thick white smoke streaming from his shoe.
“No!” McIntosh shouted, racing towards the aide with the pitcher. “Water is useless! You have to smother it! Christ! Get those kids out of here! Don’t let them see this!”
Merriman rolled towards his boys, his face a mask of pain. Aides were desperately trying to cover their eyes and pull them away from him, but the boys were kicking and screaming to be let go, trying to pull their arms free, looking back and crying out to their father.
Daddy! Oh, Please, Daddy! Please don’t die, Daddy…
The only possible way to extinguish white phosphorus was by smothering it. Ripping his suit coat off, knowing it was probably already too late for that, Agent Rip McIntosh dove onto Merriman, rolling with him, trying desperately to smother the goddamn Willie Pete with his jacket and his body. McIntosh was slapping at the ambassador’s shoe soles, ignoring the flecks of phosphorus already burning gaping holes in his bare palms.
That’s when the white phosphorus packed into the heels of both of Ambassador Merriman’s shoes burned completely through. Once exposed to air, it ignited into a flash of searing flame. The two Americans rolling on the ground were instantly incinerated, their bodies unrecognizable three seconds later.
The cameras were still rolling, broadcasting to every corner of the globe the image of the two screaming boys being dragged away from the charred black sticks that had once been an American ambassador and his would-be savior.
The beautiful hashishiyyun extinguished her cigarette in the crystal ashtray that bore the engraved seal of the American State Department. She rose from her chair and plucked the sprig of lily of the Valley from the buttonhole of her jacket. Tossing the fragrant flower into the ashtray, she took one final look out into the garden and then strode from the room. She made her way through the embassy, past screaming and panicked staffers, and down the service hallways leading to the kitchen. There was a small vegetable garden just outside the kitchen door. She walked through the garden and into the sycamore trees along the wall. She flung her shoulder bag over the wall, and, in a matter of seconds, Lily was over the wall herself.
Twenty minutes later she was standing at the peeling double doors of a crumbling nondescript building at the end of a dark cobblestone allee on the Ile de la Cite. The door cracked open and a tall woman in magenta let her inside the shadowy foyer. It was the beautiful Aubergine. High priestess of the hashishiyyun safe house in Paris.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Nantucket Island
ALEXANDER HAWKE SEIZED KERIM IN A BEAR GRIP, CLASPING both arms around his violently twisting body, pinning his arms to his sides, and saying to the man standing above with the machine gun, “If you want me, you have to go through him.”
The man laughed.
“We’re all going the same place tonight, my friend.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Paradise by any other name,” the man said with a smile in his voice, “would smell as sweet.”
“Doesn’t matter a damn to me, Shakespeare.”
“I am a Sheikh, not Shakespeare. I write only death sentences.”
“Spare me.”
The man grunted as he bent down and lifted the metal hatch-cover by one corner, positioning it with his foot, keeping the gun on Hawke and his own struggling son. He fitted one edge of the cover into the hatch and let it fall with a heavy metallic clang.
“No!” Kerim cried in the sudden darkness. “Father!”
“You heard Papa, Kerim,” Alex said. We’re all in the same boat, as it were.”
“I can’t breathe!”
“Then drop the bleeding pistol like I told you to do. Ready?”
“Shit!”
“Exactly my feeling.”
Hawke tightened his grip sharply and the boy dropped the Browning. Hawke immediately released him, seized the weapon, and brought both his knees up off the floor, catapulting Kerim over his head and slamming him against the bulkhead. There was a whuff of expelled air, a groan, and then silence. Hawke sat up and turned to face the one-time officer of the Dark Harbor PD.
Single portholes on either side of the engine room allowed him just enough moonlight to make out the dark shape crouching by the portside engine. One hand out, crabbing across the greasy metal floor, the boy was searching for something to throw at him, no doubt. Looking for a loose wrench or a screwdriver. Above, sounds of Kerim’s father moving about, making final preparations for his oceangoing jihad. A scraping noise above just then, a large piece of furniture being shoved into place, sealing the hatch-cover.
The stink of motor oil and fear sweat down here would make the hold a lousy tomb.
“Don’t even think about it!” Hawke said, squeezing the trigger. The vicious crack of the round was enough to send Kerim scuttling back into hiding behind one of the diesels. Hawke felt the sensation of water now moving past the hull. After a second, he heard the thin whirr of the electric prop coming from the stern. Kerim’s father was out on the swim platform, steering Running Tide into the westerly current where it would soon drift down on Blackhawke.
If Hawke had this scenario right, time was rapidly running out.
He fired another round and blew out the porthole just above the boy’s head. “Hello?” Hawke said, “Still with me?” He squeezed the trigger once more and heard the sharp click of a dry-fired hammer. Empty.
“Y-yes?” the boy said, as the weapon clattered across the steel deck.
“Has to be a rechargeable flashlight mounted somewhere on the engine room bulkhead, Kerim. Where?”
“I d-don’t know.”
“Right. I forgot. You’re a policeman, not a sailor.”
“I like being a policeman.”
“You should have thought of that earlier.”
“I like Maine, too. I like America. I don’t want to die. I have…a friend. The most beautiful girl. Her name is Millie and—”
“Let’s make sure I understand this. A cop running around the Maine woods in a suicide belt who loves America.”
“My father, he made me do this. Wear the belt. He hates America. He and my mother have killed many Americans. When she injected the children at the—”
“The woman who posed as the nurse, murdered all those children. That was your mother?”
“Y-yes.”
“And the girl who killed the Slade family. Your sister.”
“Yes.”
“Chief Ainslie never suspected you? Surely there was a background check.”
“We come from Pakistan. But we lived in Athens for many years before coming to this country. My father met a man there. The Emir, he was called. He and my father killed a poor farm family named Savalas and we took their identities. I’ve been a police officer for five years. Three locations. Decorated for heroism in Seattle. A fire.”
“And your mother?”
