Death Wave

doing?”

“He’s fine. He’s wrapped up his current op, and—” She broke off what she was saying.

“And what?”

“Nothing. He’s fine.”

She was about to tell me he’s getting ready for another op, Lia thought. She knew that Charlie and Ilya Akulinin were in South-central Asia, chasing some stolen suitcase nukes believed to be in the hands of the Russian mafiya. She frowned. Russian mafiya and Islamist extremists. A deadly mix.

Please be okay, Charlie, she thought.

She wondered if he might be thinking of her.

14

APPROACHING USS LAKE ERIE

GULF OF OMAN

230 MILES SOUTHWEST OF KARACHI

FRIDAY, 1040 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Dean was thinking about Lia.

Their service with the Agency didn’t exactly encourage personal relationships, with good reason. Field operators, especially, had to make decisions, hard ones sometimes, that always, always kept the mission first. Ilya had made a major error in judgment by letting himself get involved with the Alekseyevna woman. Dean didn’t begrudge his partner a bit of fun or comfort, but it would have been all too easy for Ilya to have made decisions out of concern for Masha’s safety, compromising the needs of the op.

Charlie Dean and Lia rarely deployed together anymore. No one had said anything about it back at the Puzzle Palace, but they knew how he felt about Lia. Rubens knew, certainly.

Damn, he missed her.

He sat on a hard, narrow seat in the back of a U.S. Navy MH-60S helicopter, flying southwest across a night- shrouded ocean. Unofficially known as the Knighthawk because it was replacing the venerable CH-46D Sea Knight, the aircraft flew off both aircraft carriers and smaller naval vessels in a multi-mission role that included “VERTREP” resupply at sea, search-and rescue, and even combat with its add-on “batwing,” or armed helicopter kit. An hour ago, he and Akulinin had boarded the helo at Masroor Air Base, a Pakistani military airfield on the western side of Karachi. The Knighthawk had flown in from USS Constellation, somewhere in the Gulf of Oman to the south, refueled, and readied for a flight to USS Lake Erie.

Ilya was seated across from him, all but anonymous in his baggy Navy flight suit and helmet. Dean wondered where Lia was right now; the last he’d heard, she was in Berlin tracking down the Chinese connection in this puzzle.

He hoped she was okay.

“So what’s the story?” Akulinin asked, shouting to make himself heard above the pounding roar of the Knighthawk’s rotors. “They bringing in a Black CAT?”

“Don’t know yet,” Dean yelled back. “CAT Bravo is being deployed, but that’s going to take time. We may have to use assets in place.”

Black CAT was the NSA’s highly secret Deep Black Combat Assault Team, a specialized unit drawn from active duty U.S. Navy SEAL and Army Delta personnel. CAT Alpha was based in San Diego; CAT Bravo was at the Marine base at Pax River, Maryland.

Getting a twenty-four-man unit with its equipment from Virginia to the Indian Ocean, however, would take at least twenty-four hours, and possibly more … and that was after they got clearance to go in the first place. Rubens had told Dean earlier that they were still waiting to hear from the White House on a go/no-go decision about the Yakutsk. He was trying to pre-position the team, but even that required high-level authorization, and from the sound of it, everyone in Washington right now was playing a round of cover-your-ass.

There was a SEAL detachment with the Constellation Battle Group, and a forty- man troop — two platoons — was being flown in from Kuwait. If they got the go-ahead, Rubens might well decide to use the CBG — the “assets in place” Dean had mentioned — rather than wait for CAT Bravo to deploy halfway around the world. One way or the other, though, Rubens wanted Dean and Akulinin present when the Yakutsk op went down.

The helicopter lurched, dropping a dozen feet, then gave a heavy jolt. The air was rough this morning, the sky overcast and promising rain. When Dean turned to peer through one of the rectangular windows set in the Knighthawk’s port-side sliding door, he saw gray ocean below, and nothing else.

Another half hour or so, he thought, until they reached the Lake Erie.

Then the real fun would begin.

HOTEL SOL

PUERTO NAOS

LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS

FRIDAY, 1615 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Lia DeFrancesca looked up as the tall, slender man entered the hotel lobby. She checked the photograph currently being displayed on her BlackBerry but already knew that it was Vincent Carlylse — pale and wispy hair, glasses, jutting nose.

And he wasn’t alone.

“Target acquired,” she murmured, putting away the BlackBerry. The Art Room had sent her the image — from the dust jacket of a recent book — earlier that morning. The woman with him, though, was going to be a complication. “He’s with someone, a younger woman.”

“A prostitute?” Rockman’s voice shot back.

“Now how the hell am I supposed to know that?”

“I don’t know. Prostitutes carry big, shiny purses, right? How’s she dressed?”

“She looks like another tourist. Slacks, blouse, sunglasses …”

“They used a prostitute to get to Pender in his hotel room,” Rockman told her. “They might be using the same plot here.”

“Wait one. I’m going to make contact.”

As Carlylse and the woman crossed the lobby, the desk clerk called out. “Ah! Senor Carlylse! Hay un mensaje …”

Lia emerged from behind one of the tropical plants. The clerk saw her and bowed. “This lady,” he said in English, “wished to speak with you.”

“Mr. Carlylse?” she said, extending a hand. “I’m Diane Lau. It is important that I talk to you.”

“I see,” the writer said, looking her up and down. “Are you a reporter?”

“Not … exactly.” She smiled at the woman. “Is this your wife?”

“Why … uh, yes. Yes, she is.” She looked Spanish, with black hair and olive skin. She might have been a tourist from the mainland, or she could have been a native islander.

“This concerns your books,” Lia told him, “and your collaborator, Jack Pender.”

“Jack? I haven’t seen him in over two months. How is the old son of a bitch?”

“Mr. Carlylse, I need to speak with you alone. Please. It’s important.”

He pulled a keycard from his shirt pocket and handed it to the woman. “Why don’t you go on up to our room, my dear? Room 312. I’ll be along in a moment.”

Without saying a word, the woman took the key, gave Lia a dark look, then walked away, her heeled sandals clicking across the marble floor. She was young, no older than her midtwenties, while Carlylse was easily fifty. She might be his wife … but Lia was willing to bet she wasn’t. She glanced around the lobby. There were other people there — a man reading a Spanish newspaper, a young couple watching a television monitor. It was just a little too public here.