Death Wave

“That … or your handlers decided to send you after Mr. Chatel. What did you see in him?”

She thought she saw an opportunity. “Look … my name is Cathy Chung, and I am with the U.S. State Department. COSCO is on our watch list, you know … because of the Empress Phoenix affair. My bosses were curious about you, and they did plant me on you in order to find out if COSCO was up to no good.”

“Indeed? And what did you learn?”

“Nothing. After I met you in Spain, they decided you weren’t important. They told me to come home.”

“You live in the Canary Islands?”

“No. I decided to take a bit of vacation as long as I was over here, and Herve offered to let me tag along with him to the Canaries.” She managed a shrug, despite the weight of the guard’s hands still pressing down on her shoulders. “I thought he would be fun, but he disappeared on me as soon as we got to the hotel.”

“Mm.” He turned and raised his voice. “Mr. Chatel! Would you come in here a moment?”

Chatel entered the tent a moment later. He must have been standing just outside the tent’s entrance. “Yes, sir?”

“Ms. Chung here told me she came to these islands with you. Is that true?”

“She was on my flight out of Alicante.” A Gallic shrug. “I assumed you’d sent her here on some errand that was none of my business. She didn’t come with me, however. We didn’t even speak —”

“He’s lying,” Lia said, snarling the words through clenched teeth. If she could get the two of them squabbling with one another, there might be an opening for her, at least a chance to cause confusion enough to help her escape.

“She suggests that the two of you have a relationship. Is that true?”

“Absolutely not.” He cocked his head to one side. “She is pretty … but definitely not my type.”

“She is female, which makes her your type,” Feng said. “But I believe you. You may go.”

Chatel left the tent. Feng leaned over her, pinning her with cold eyes.

“I believe you to be CIA, Ms. Chung … or whatever your real name is.”

“I am not CIA—”

“And we will learn the truth, soon enough. What your real name is. Who you work for. What you know about our … our operation here. Everything.”

“Go to hell! I’m telling you the truth!”

“Perhaps you are. We’ll soon know for certain, however, one way or another. I have a … a specialist flying in. He’ll be here tomorrow, and then we will learn everything about you that we wish to know.”

An interrogation, then, and a professional one if they were bringing in a specialist. With torture? Drugs?

Lia felt very cold, and very much alone.

“Tie her to the chair,” Feng told the guard. Reaching out casually, he lightly stroked her cheek. She snapped her head back, pulling away from the touch. He smiled. “And keep a very close eye on her. I want two guards in here with her at all times, watching her, two more outside the tent, and two more at a distance, watching them. If there is one mouse in the woodpile, there are almost certainly more.”

“Ya m’allmi!” the guard replied.

Lia hoped that CJ and Carlylse had already gotten back to the hidden bikes and were on their way down the side of the mountain.

“We’re with you,” the voice of Marie Telach whispered in her ear. “We know exactly where you are, and we’ll find a way to get you out of there.”

Maybe so — but Marie was thirty-five hundred miles away. Lia wished Charlie was somewhere close by, but he was even farther away than the Art Room, almost five thousand miles if he was still in South Asia.

If she was going to get out of this, she would have to do it on her own.

OFFICE, ANSA

WHITE HOUSE BASEMENT,

WASHINGTON, D.C.

SUNDAY, 1331 HOURS EDT

“So what the hell is so important that you flagged it Yankee White?” General James demanded. “You drag my ass back in here on a Sunday—”

Rubens dropped a file folder on James’ desk. “We have recovered two of the Lebed’s suitcase nukes,” he said. “We know where the other ten are, who has them, and what they’re going to do with them. We need military intervention to secure them. Now.”

James stared into Rubens’ eyes for a moment, then picked up the folder and leafed through the report inside.

“You’re suggesting an MEU?” James gave it the in-service pronunciation, “em-you.” The letters stood for Marine Expeditionary Unit.

“I believe MEU-26 is in the mid-Atlantic, sir. The Iwo Jima strike group. They could be deployed to La Palma with a minimum of delay.”

“FORECON may be the best we can do.” He read for another moment. “You realize this requires presidential approval?”

“That’s why I’m here, sir.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Unknown, sir. However, one piece of intercepted intelligence suggested that the bad guys were going to have everything ready sometime this coming week … and we believe earlier in the week rather than later. If I had to guess, tomorrow or Tuesday.”

“Shit. You’re just full of good news, aren’t you?”

“That’s what they pay me for.”

“And you really think these terrorists are able to generate a tidal wave of this magnitude?”

Rubens shifted uncomfortably. James had immediately highlighted the weakest part of the threat assessment. “There are … pros and cons,” he admitted. “We have a lot of good people looking at the situation. A geology professor over at Georgetown tells me that the idea of La Palma blowing up and causing a hundred-meter tsunami is a crock. It would take just the right explosion, triggering a really big volcanic eruption, and with a lot of rock hitting the ocean all at once, to make a respectable wave. She says that computer modeling carried out in Holland recently suggests that it just wouldn’t happen that way.”

“But?”

Rubens sighed and nodded. “But. Can we take the chance? Do we gamble the entire U.S. East Coast on those Dutch computer simulations? What if they’re wrong?”

“The terrorists obviously think they have something. Otherwise, they wouldn’t use ten suitcase nukes just to make a big splash. They’d go after cities.”

“Exactly. We think there may have been a power struggle inside JeM over those nukes. The two weapons we’ve just recovered in the Gulf of Aden were probably the compromise—‘okay, we’ll give you two weapons to use against Israel, if you let us have the other ten for La Palma.’ ”

“I’m still not sure I follow that logic,” James said. “Sure, if the tidal wave thing works, they have us on our knees. But it seems like a hell of a long shot. They’d be better off smuggling those weapons into ten U.S. cities.”

“I think, sir, that they’re looking for something more. Not a political or economic victory. A religious victory.”

“What do you mean?”

Rubens pointed at the folder. “You saw the part about the writer?”

“The guy in New Jersey? Yes.” He leafed back through the report. “Here he is. Jack Pender.”

“Pender was assassinated by JeM or al-Qaeda killers at a hotel in Fort Lee last Wednesday. It took us a long time, though, to figure out why.”