The Crimson Code. Rachel Lee

      He hung up and sat back in his chair. Everything was going as it should. Another smile creased his face. Every revolution required an army, and soon he would have his. What’s more, the very government he intended to seize would be paying for that army. The effortless irony of his plans gave him a heady feeling of power, almost a rush. Better than Napoleon brandy and Cuban cigars.

      But even as he was feeling smugly content, the news broke away from its coverage of random acts of malice to something far more deadly.

      “Today in Vienna,” the reporter said, “special agents of the EU and the United States carried out a joint strike on a terrorist cell believed to have been involved in Black Christmas….”

      Soult sat forward quickly, brandy forgotten, and turned up the volume. Pictures of bodies being carried out flashed across the screen, along with exterior shots of a nondescript concrete apartment house of a type that had become common after the war, a type Soult felt was a blight on the beauty of Europe.

      Bodies. Nine terrorists killed in a fierce gun battle. And then the face of the American president, Harrison Rice. “This is only the beginning,” the president said. “We will hunt down these terrorists to the last man. In cooperation with our European allies, we will not allow these atrocities to go unavenged. Thank you.”

      Soult sat back slowly. For the first time that day, he sensed something at work that was beyond his knowledge. Beyond his control.

      Every bit of triumph he had been feeling vanished like a puff of smoke from the end of his cigar.

      Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

      Ahmed Ahsami watched the television, absolutely livid. His men had gone in there to take out those terrorists, but the situation had been snatched away. Among the nine “terrorists” whose pictures were now being broadcast to the world was Yawi. His sister’s son.

      He slammed his hand down on his desk over and over, grief and anger warring on a scale that was beyond speech, beyond description. At that moment he could have blasted the entire world into oblivion.

      Someone was using him. Someone he thought was an ally. Nothing else could possibly explain this. The information had come to him about the location of the terrorists, but it had apparently gone to someone else, as well. How else could Austrian and American commandos have arrived just minutes after the survivors on his team had withdrawn? That could not have happened by coincidence.

      His nephew and Isa had been killed, offered up like sacrificial lambs, and were now being labeled as part of the terrorist cell. And the American president was standing smugly before a bank of microphones, his Alabama drawl and artificially confident smile reminiscent of nothing so much as a plantation owner swearing that rebelling slaves would be hunted down.