Day of Reckoning (Shadow Warriors) Read online

  “How did you end up at the Agency?” she asked, watching the countryside speed past.

  He looked over at her, surprise glinting in those steel-blue eyes. “Why?”

  “No reason, really,” Carol replied, taken off-guard herself by the intensity of his response.

  Silence fell once again between the two of them as Harry turned the SUV onto a side road. When he spoke again, his voice was heavy with irony. “Sometimes you have to lay down your dreams and pick up a gun…just because it’s the right thing to do and there’s no one else to do it. Not much point in looking back.” He pointed up the road at an off-white double-wide trailer nestled in a grove of leafless trees. “We’re here. Do me a favor.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “What?”

  “Let me do the talking.”

  11:57 A.M.

  The mosque

  Dearborn, Michigan

  Words of purity. Words of truth. The words of God, subhanahu wa ta’ala. The most glorified, the most high. Tarik Abdul Muhammad’s fingers traced over the flowing Arabic calligraphy, reading the sacred words of the Qur’an. Who doth more wrong than he who inventeth a lie against God…

  “Salaam alaikum, my brother,” a familiar voice greeted, interrupting his thoughts. Blessing and peace be upon you.

  A smile crossed Tarik’s face as he turned, looking into the eyes of the mosque’s imam, a grey-bearded man in his late fifties. He was dressed in Western clothing, as were they all. There was no point in drawing attention to themselves.

  “Alaikum salaam,” he replied, placing both of his hands on the shoulders of the older man and drawing him close as they kissed on both cheeks in the traditional Arab greeting. “Is everything prepared for my brothers?”

  “Arrangements have been made,” Imam Abu Kareem al-Fileestini replied, turning and giving a warm smile to Tarik’s four companions. “They will be provided for, inshallah.”

  “And the scientist?”

  “At hand,” was the imam’s response. Abu Kareem turned and beckoned to a swarthy young man standing in the doorway, a can of Mountain Dew clutched in his hand.

  About five or six years younger than himself, Tarik thought, taking the measure of the man in one sweeping glance as the imam kept talking. “Our brother from Lebanon, Jamal al-Khalidi, an honor student at U of M.”

  Tarik smiled, reaching out to enfold the young man’s hand in both of his own. “Wolverines…”

  1:19 P.M. Eastern Time

  Graves Mill, Virginia

  As the camera’s shutter clicked crisply, taking picture after picture, they all showed basically the same thing: a smiling, happy couple—family snapshots—a doting husband, an adoring wife.

  Who said pictures never lie?

  “I’ve got enough,” Rhoda Stevens announced at length, laying down her camera and retreating behind her laptop. In her mid-fifties, she still moved with the grace of the runner she was.

  Carol reached up and firmly removed Harry’s hand from her shoulder as she stood and stretched.

  She walked over to where the Jamaican woman sat, now diligently working away in a photo-editing program. The green screen that had served as their background had now disappeared from view, replaced by a glorious vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Smoke curled upward from the cigarette clutched tightly in the woman’s ebony hand, wispy tendrils filling the air with the pungent smell of marijuana.

  “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

  Rhoda chuckled, a rich, throaty sound. “Thirty years, both sides of the law. Wish I could do the same thing in real life—wouldn’t look so old.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Carol saw Harry cross the room, cautiously glancing out the window. “How soon can you have the documents ready, Rhoda?”

  “Forty minutes, give or take.” Another long drag on the joint. “When did you get so nervous, Harry? I don’t remember that from before.”

  The look Harry shot back across the room could have frozen stone. “Just do it as quickly as you can. They’re going to throw the net wider with every passing hour.”

  The black woman was unfazed, her gaze never leaving the screen of her laptop. “Then wait in the next room, will you? Nerves can be contagious.”

  12:23 P.M. Central Time

  Dearborn, Michigan

  One of the benefits of Dearborn’s crime rate was that there was no difficulty disposing of an unwanted car. Leave it unattended long enough, and it would disappear. No muss, no fuss.

  Abdul Aziz Omar reached back into the car one last time, wiping the steering wheel with a cloth. There was no sense in leaving his prints—having spent eight of his thirty-one years behind bars in the state penitentiary meant that the cops had them on file.

  He closed the car door and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, fingers closing around the curved grip of a Smith & Wesson Model 27 revolver. It wasn’t safe to walk these streets unarmed, the tall black man thought, looking cautiously both ways as he exited the alley where he’d left the car.

  The gang-bangers and crackheads preferred semiautomatics when they could get them, which was far too often these days. After all, they were the guns you saw on TV and in music videos.

  Omar’s choice of the .357 Magnum was more prosaic, based on a simple bit of advice from a fellow inmate. The man had been an unrepentant infidel, serving a life sentence for rape and murder, but his advice had been sound.

  Revolvers don’t eject their shell casings. Keep your shots few and effective and you can walk off the crime scene with half the evidence the cops usually depend on.

  It made sense. His eyes continued to rove the desolate street as he made his way back toward the mosque several blocks away. A paradise of tranquility in the middle of hell.

  The same could not be said of the bar to his right as he moved down the street, his long legs covering the ground in smooth, powerful strides. Right now it appeared innocent, almost harmless in the bright rays of daylight, but he knew different.

  Another five, six hours and it would be transformed into a noisy, raucous den of iniquity.

  He should know, for that had once been his trade. He closed his eyes in remembrance and could once again feel the discs spinning beneath his deft fingers. DD Cool, they’d called him in those days, those heady, sinful days of drugs, sex and music.

  The Cool was self-explanatory. As for the double D, well he’d had his own proclivities back in the day.

  Before…he took a deep breath of ice-cold air, shamed that even now his body stirred at the memory. Before he had found the peace of Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala.

  In the afterglow of peace, in the dark enclosure of that prison, he had been given a new name. Abdul Aziz, the servant of the Magnificent, one of the hundred names of God.

  His steps quickened as he neared the mosque. That’s all he was now, a humble servant. A servant on a mission from God…

  1:56 P.M. Eastern Time

  Graves Mill, Virginia

  Nerves. Rhoda’s perception had been accurate, as usual—she’d been in the business a long time, longer than him, and not much got past her.

  The nerves. When had they started? Harry didn’t even need to ask the question, he knew.

  Hamid Zakiri. All roads led there, to that devastating moment of betrayal there in Jerusalem. Because, in the end, it didn’t matter that Zakiri had eluded detection from everyone else at Langley.

  All that mattered was that he had failed to see it, and people were dead because of it. One man in particular: Davood Sarami.

  His man. One of the team.

  With an instinct born of training, Harry pulled himself from his thoughts to cast another cautious glance out the front window of the trailer. A car sped by, its wheels spinning up icy slush.

  Too fast for a surveillance team. He felt eyes on his back and turned his head to see Carol staring at him.

  At his glance, she looked away, the silence hanging awkwardly between them. “I’m sorry…” she
began slowly, her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her jacket.

  Carol still wasn’t looking at him, but he could see her chewing hesitantly at her lower lip as she considered her next words. He had to build her confidence, prepare her for what lay ahead. Whatever it took, whatever he had to say. Whatever she needed to hear.

  “For what?”

  “For breaking down—earlier. You don’t need that, not now.” There was anger flashing in those blue eyes now, anger shining through fresh tears. “I just feel so helpless…so weak. I’m ashamed of myself.”

  Harry crossed the room to stand before her, looking down into her eyes. She started to speak, but he put a finger to her lips. “There’s nothin’ for you to be ashamed of, nothing in this world. No one does well their first time out in the field—and there’s no way to do well at losing someone you’ve loved.”

  No way. And as he held her gently against him, even as tears rolled down her face, a part of him was shocked to realize that he actually meant it.

  1:59 P.M.

  NCS Operations Center

  Langley, Virginia

  “Any progress on Harry’s known associates in the greater D.C.area?” Carter asked, arriving back in the op-center.

  Lasker looked over the top of his cubicle and shook his head in the negative. “Most of the people Nichols has worked with over the years are overseas contacts—and they’re not the type of people who get handed a green card.”

  Carter rubbed his forehead. “Is there anyone that looks like a possible? Someone he might turn to at this time?”

  “There was one.”

  “Does he live within the current projected search quadrants?”

  Lasker cleared his throat. “It’s a she, and she’s dead.” He hit a couple buttons and an image came across the screen of his workstation. “Rhoda Stevens, a private ‘contractor’ for the Agency in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Skilled forger, twice arrested for identity theft and falsifying passports, involved with some of the drug traffic in and out of Jamaica. We used her for much the same work, just more…legitimately.”

  “So, what happened?”

  The young CLANDOPS comm chief tapped his screen. “In addition to her more illicit ‘talents’, Ms. Stevens was a marathoner of no mean stature. She was in the final two miles of the 2012 Boston Marathon when she collapsed. Paramedics responding to the 911 call pronounced her dead of a massive heart attack.”

  Carter eyed the picture thoughtfully. “Anything else?”

  “Matter of fact, yes,” Lasker replied, grabbing a printout off the stack in front of him and handing it back to the analyst. “This from the boys at Ft. Meade. They’ve spent the last few hours running a fine-toothed comb through the hundreds of cell calls made from the area of the bombing this morning, back-tracing a couple hours before the blast.”

  “And?”

  “A call was placed just five minutes after the bomb went off—the conversation was short, and scrambled, but they finally managed to reconstruct part of it. The caller, a Caucasian male, used the word Eaglefire.”

  Carter’s eyebrows went up. “Any idea what that’s supposed to mean?”

  “It’s why the NSA flagged the call—it’s one of our codes, or used to be, at least. I remember them phasing it out shortly after I took over Comms last year. It’s a call for back-up.”

  “There seems to be a rash of those lately,” Carter mused, his eyes scanning over the sheet. “I’ll need to kick this up the chain—any idea where the boss is?”

  “Last word had him on the seventh floor with Shapiro—got pulled in for a meeting of the minds.”

  The analyst snorted. “No wonder they needed Kranemeyer…”

  2:01 P.M.

  Graves Mill, Virginia

  The driver’s license and passport were authentic—at least they looked that way. The same with the vacation photos that now filled Carol’s new wallet.

  Harry snapped the wallet shut and handed it over to Carol. “I think that should do it,” he announced, looking over to where Rhoda Stevens still sat behind her laptop. “You’ve been a friend.”

  Another raspy chuckle. The black woman stubbed out her cigarette in the engraved pewter ashtray on her desk and rose. “Well, you’ve still got the feds and half the law enforcement in the state breathing down your neck. Where you headed from here?”

  There was something unnatural in her voice, a forced casualness. Alarm bells sounded in Harry’s mind as he turned toward her. “Can’t say, Rhoda—any idea what the weather forecast is for North Carolina?”

  She laughed, looking over to where Carol stood by the door. “No, I don’t, but I hear it’s beautiful this time of year.”

  Eyes were on them as they walked out to the SUV. Harry could feel them on his back and the Colt seemed to stir beneath his jacket at the sense of peril. Carol paused as they got to the vehicle. “I wouldn’t have told her where we were going,” she said, more than a hint of reproof in her voice.

  He looked down into her eyes. “You felt it, too.”

  She nodded as he pulled open the door of the SUV for her. “There’s something she wasn’t telling us.”

  Harry walked around the front of the Excursion and levered himself up into the driver’s seat. It was only then that he looked over at her. “Then you’ll be delighted to know that I lied.”

  Rhoda watched them go, watched as the SUV pulled out of her driveway and sped off down the road, heading south. It was only when they were safely out of sight that she stepped back from the window and made her way down the hallway, stopping by the bedroom door.

  Silence. She knocked lightly, then pushed open the door without waiting for a response.

  “I still think you should have told them,” she announced, shooting a look of frustration at the big man who lay on her bed, his body wrapped in bandages.

  David Lay shook his head wearily, wincing in pain at the effort. “There’s no point to it, Rhoda—the knowledge of my presence would only endanger them further. She’ll be safe with him.”

  A moment’s pause, and a look of pain not unmingled with despair flickered across the face of the wounded man. “She has to be.”

  Chapter 5

  1:31 P.M. Central Time

  Fargo, North Dakota

  It took quite a snowstorm to shut Fargo schools, but that was just what they’d had. Twenty-eight inches of the white stuff blanketing the Northern Plains.

  Which meant there was no school for her to teach. There had been a day when she would have welcomed the break, but not today. Not since the passing of her sister, less than a month before.

  Mary—tall and pretty, long chestnut curls. The cute little sister, four years her junior. Family members had joked that their personalities couldn’t have been more different—Mary cheerful and buoyant, not a care in the world. And her own demeanor, reserved, intense. Analytical. They were the skills that had her teaching algebra in one of Fargo’s many high schools.

  Unmarried, she had never attracted men in the same way as her younger sister. It wasn’t that she was without appeal in the looks department, but her personality tended to intimidate men. She wasn’t the type to hang out at a singles bar on Friday night.

  Alicia Workman looked down at the picture of her sister on her computer desk and felt the tears well up in her eyes. Mary’s romanticism, her ability to attract men and fall head over heels into love, had been her undoing.

  They’d found Mary dead in her apartment in D.C., dead of an overdose of prescription painkillers. The suicide note was disjointed and rambling. None of it made sense—not unless you had all the pieces.

  Her hand moved from the picture to the letter lying beneath it. A printout of her sister’s last e-mail, five days before her suicide. All of her hopes and dreams, laid out in stark 12-pt Times New Roman.

  Her love for a man.

  A married man.

  Alicia stole a glance out her apartment’s window, at the still-swirling snow. The pieces of a field-stripped Bersa S
torm lay beside Mary’s letter, taken down for cleaning.

  It was a little thing, a pocket semiautomatic chambered in .380 ACP. Having grown up around guns on her grandfather’s ranch, Alicia knew all too well the capabilities and limitations of the pistol.

  Her gaze flickered to the newspaper clippings and computer printouts that decorated one wall of the apartment. The smiling face of a man loved by so many.

  Only one question remained: would it be enough?

  8:35 P.M. Local Time

  Bonn, Germany

  “Mr. President, can we have a statement?”

  “Do you have a statement on the possible dissolution of the EU, Mr. President?”

  “Statement?”

  “Mr. President! Is there going to be an agree—”

  The limousine door closed with a satisfying click, the noise outside fading away into a low roar.

  “Quite a morning.”

  President Roger Hancock looked up into the eyes of his Chief of Staff. “That’s the understatement of the year, Ian.”

  The economic troubles that had plagued the European Union ever since the Greek debt crisis had finally come to a head. Spain and Portugal had quickly followed Greece into the dangerous realms of default, sending shock waves across the continent.

  With country after country going down the tubes, Germany and France—arguably still the strongest economies in Europe—had come to the decision that remaining in the EU was no longer in their best interests.

  And that’s why he was here. To use up his remaining political capital trying to convince them otherwise.

  At fifty-three, the President of the United States was still a young man, but four years in office had taken its toll upon his once-boyish good looks. Brown hair was now heavily streaked with silver, something his aides had said gave him “gravitas”.

  Devil take gravitas.

  “Any more news out of D.C.?”

  Ian Cahill shook his head. The Irishman had been with Hancock for ten years, ever since the Wisconsin native’s first run for U.S. Senate. First as campaign manager, then Chief of Staff. Born and raised in Chicago, the sixty-two-year-old Cahill had earned his reputation as a street fighter in the notoriously nasty world of Illinois politics.