“Brynn, don’t fight them,” Patterson rasped. He was bleeding badly from a cut beneath his right eye, which was swollen shut, and more blood was streaming down from a wound on his scalp. His suit was torn and stained, but he didn’t look scared in the least. “Help is on the way. A GPS signal went out to the backup team when the first rocket hit…The technology is standard issue for embassy vehicles. All the cars are fitted with it. Reinforcements will be here any minute.”
“They won’t arrive in time,” a voice announced in perfect English. It was the man who’d just killed the injured woman. He had stopped a few feet away, and his gaze was alternating between them. “You have no chance of being rescued. You have no chance of escape. At this point, I’m afraid you only have one option, and that is to cooperate.”
“What do you mean, ‘cooperate’?” the ambassador demanded, his voice getting stronger and more indignant with each passing syllable. “Who the hell are you? Why are you doing this? What do you want?”
“Nothing from you,” the man responded calmly. “In fact, we don’t need you at all.”
He nodded to one of the soldiers standing next to Patterson. The subordinate stepped back to allow for the length of his rifle, which he brought to his shoulder in one clean movement. The muzzle was aimed directly at the back of the ambassador’s head.
“No!” Fitzgerald screamed. She got to her feet and staggered forward, but she was quickly restrained on either side. Her heart was pumping so hard, she thought it would burst. She didn’t know exactly what was happening here, but she couldn’t let her oldest, closest friend die right in front of her eyes. Not if she could stop it. “Don’t hurt him! Please!”
The man with the handgun looked at her steadily for a long moment. Then, without warning, he peeled off the balaclava with his free hand.
“Oh my God,” Fitzgerald breathed. She looked hard at the man’s face, unwilling to believe her eyes. “I know you….”
“Yes, I can see you do.” Amari Saifi smiled gently; there was something about his voice and manner that was eerily pleasant. “Tell me, Dr. Fitzgerald…Why shouldn’t we kill this man?”
“He’s a senior member of the Foreign Service,” she said, thinking frantically, “and he’s very wealthy. If it’s money you want, he could be useful to you. If you intend to keep me alive, it will be…You’ll have two hostages instead of one. Killing him doesn’t help you.” Her voice had been rising steadily, but it couldn’t be helped; she could no longer restrain her panic. “Don’t you see that? It doesn’t help you to kill him!”
“It doesn’t necessarily hurt us, either, and we only came for you.” Having made his instructions clear, Saifi nodded to the man with the rifle.
Fitzgerald howled in helpless rage and tried to pull away from her captors. At the same time, Patterson opened his mouth to speak. He didn’t manage a single word. There was a sharp crack as the 7.62mm round tore through his face, leaving a gaping wound in place of his left cheek. There was a strange moment where everything seemed to freeze, after which his lifeless body pitched forward onto the grass.
Fitzgerald just stared in horror for a few seconds. Then it hit her like a solid blow to the chest, and she dropped to her knees, a low, sick moan rising up in her throat. She was in shock, completely numb, and she missed what happened next: the rapid approach of an unmarked van from the north, where the road was still clear; the sound of distant sirens and the steady blat of helicopter blades; the Algerian’s rapid commands carrying over the din. However, despite her semiconscious state, she couldn’t miss the needle that was jabbed forcefully into her right arm. The plunger went down, and the needle came out. Then the dark swarmed in, swallowing her in an endless black sea.
CHAPTER 11
WASHINGTON, D.C.
It was just after 7:20 AM Eastern Standard Time as the elevator slowed to a halt on the basement level of the West Wing. Once the doors slid open, Jonathan Harper stepped out and hung a right, making his way past a Secret Service agent and several members of the National Security Council secretariat. The men and women of the secretariat were the primary occupants of the White House Situation Room, which was actually a 5000-square-foot warren of interconnected rooms. The vast underground complex—sometimes referred to, inexplicably, as “the woodshed”—also incorporated the NSC watch center. Harper only glanced at the harried faces as he walked past, but it was clear they were operating in a state of suspended disbelief. The deputy DCI felt much the same; he was still trying to get his mind around what had transpired in Pakistan less than an hour earlier.
He’d gotten the first call from the watch officer at Langley at 6:25. He’d been at home, eating breakfast, when the secure line buzzed in the next room. Less than ten minutes later, he was dressed and on his way out the door, but he’d barely slid into the backseat of the waiting Town Car when his BlackBerry started to vibrate. It was the White House senior duty officer, or SDO, informing him that an emergency meeting had been called by the president and was set to begin in twenty minutes’ time.
Before he had been nominated for the post of deputy executive director, Harper had served as the CIA’s deputy director of operations (DDO). Back then his name had been classified, withheld from the media, but his current role did not allow for such ambiguities. The attempt on his life eight months earlier had only heightened the media’s interest in him, and for this reason, he and his wife had been forced to sell their brownstone on historic General’s Row, just south of Dupont Circle. After a brief search, they’d settled on a five-bedroom town house on Embassy Row. While the house itself was everything they’d been looking for, it made for a slightly longer drive to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He’d used the time in the car to get hold of his primary advisors, who’d filled him in on what they knew. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much, and now he had to share that fact with the president.
He was admitted to the conference room. Like the rest of the West Wing basement, the room had been extensively remodeled in 2006. The mahogany walls had been largely replaced with a specially designed, sound-absorbent fabric, and sensors built into the ceiling alerted the Secret Service to the presence of activated cell phones, which were prohibited for reasons of security. It all combined to make for a very quiet space, but never more so than today. The faces around the long mahogany table were understandably grim, but they were all recognizable, at least to anyone with a passing interest in the U.S. government.
Flanking the president was Emily Susskind, the recently confirmed director of the FBI; also, her deputy, Harry Judd; and Kenneth Bale, the director of National Intelligence. To Bale’s left was Robert Andrews, the ample, dark-haired director of Central Intelligence. He nodded a curt hello when he caught his subordinate’s eye. The other side of the table was occupied by the undersecretary for political affairs, Elliot Greengrass; Jeremy Thayer, the national security advisor; and Stan Chavis, the president’s chief of staff.
There was one other person in the room, seated next to DCI Andrews. He appeared more shaken than the other officials around the table, which was understandable. As assistant secretary for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and director of the Office of Foreign Missions, Gavin Dowd was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the DSS, as well as the protection of numerous State Department officials, including Brynn Fitzgerald. If blame was to be dispensed at this meeting, the sixty-year-old former prosecutor would likely receive the lion’s share.
“Jonathan,” the president said from the head of the table. David Brenneman usually looked at least a decade younger than his fifty-four years. His short, wavy hair still held more brown than silver, and it was no secret that his open, honest features had assisted him greatly over the course of his political career. On this particular morning, though, he looked every inch his age. Harper took that as a bad sign, as the day had hardly begun. “Pull up a chair. We were just about to get started.”
There was only one chair to be had, but Harper didn’t point