Two days later . . .
Jacob Snow stood in the CIA office in Athens doing his debriefing, his face still puffy from the beating he had taken two days before, one hand swathed in gauze from the cut he got climbing over the broken glass on top of the wall. And he had bled all over that poor man’s taxi. At least his teeth hadn’t fallen out.
He’d worried about that. Jacob cared about his appearance. Bruises came and went, but an attractive smile could seduce from a hundred yards.
Not that station director Tyler Wallace cared about his smile. The hulking African-American ex-Marine preferred scowling, and he sure was scowling now.
Not at Jacob, but at what he had called him in for.
“You’ve done a good job, as usual, Jacob. That intel is going to lead to a dozen airstrikes like the one we just did in Damascus.”
“It won’t help. By the time you’ve pinpointed all those different headquarters, they’ll have evacuated. You shouldn’t have hit the Damascus branch until you knew about the others.”
Wallace’s frowned deepened. “I know that. You think I’m an idiot?”
“No, but the higher-ups are.”
“The president needed something solid for the midterms.”
“The president should take the long view.”
“Fat chance. Now on to new business. We’ve gotten some strange intel through our operatives in Cairo,” he said, “and we think it’s linked to a robbery in Boston.”
“What kind of intel?” Jacob asked.
“From an undercover agent in The Sword of the Righteous. The Cairo branch. He’s not in too deep, so a lot of his information is secondhand, and none of it is confirmed, but it’s troubling enough.”
“It’s always troubling with that crowd,” Jacob grumbled, unconsciously rubbing the biggest bruise, one that made one of his high cheekbones stand out like a plum.
“You look fine,” Wallace said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “My God, I’ve never met a man who cared so much about his looks.”
“It’s handy when trying to get into people’s confidence.”
“Is that a double entendre?” Wallace grunted. “If you care about your precious face so much, maybe you should stop getting beaten up by terrorists.”
“That’s your fault, not mine,” Jacob said with a smile.
“Whatever. Our mole in The Sword of the Righteous says they’re planning on hitting our embassy in Cairo, but first they need something from Boston. And just a couple of days ago, someone stole an Egyptian artifact from a museum in Boston.”
“That’s a pretty thin connection.”
“It’s gets better, or worse. The Sword of the Righteous is trying to get the relic from a Boston crime boss, an Iraqi named Omar Al-Fulan. They’re paying him in heroin.”
“Why would they need an ancient Egyptian relic to attack the U.S. embassy? That makes no sense.”
“No, it doesn’t, but our operative is sure there’s a connection. Maybe they want to sell it and buy some special weapon?”
“Why not just sell the heroin and do that?”
Wallace shrugged. “Maybe they think they can get more for the artifact. Or maybe it’s the artifact itself somehow. It’s unique.”
“What is it, anyway?”
“A Canopic jar. When someone got mummified, they put their organs into four different jars, except this was from a burial that had five Canopic jars. The fifth had a totally different design than anything ever seen before. It’s all in the report.”
Wallace pushed a black folder across his table, sealed with a gold stamp.
Jacob glanced at the folder but didn’t pick it up. “What do we know about Omar al-Fulan?”
“Not much. He’s forty-two, mixed Iraqi-Egyptian heritage, comes from a prominent family of merchants. There are rumors he’s involved in the drug trade, but there’s never been enough evidence to bring charges, and trust me, the DEA has tried. The guy is also a bit of a playboy, a habitual gambler. He can be ruthless and he’s not above using violence. Once again, not enough evidence. He’s not known to be affiliated with any terrorist groups.”
“Strictly in it for the money, eh?”
“Yeah. Now the Canopic jar was discovered by an American archaeologist who found it on a dig in Egypt a couple of years ago. She’s running an excavation in Morocco right now, and we think she might end up a target. Even if she doesn’t, she might have some insight into why this Canopic jar is so special. So I want you to run through the file and pick one of our Moroccan operatives to contact her.”
Jacob cocked his head. “Pick one of the Moroccan operatives? You mean you don’t want me to go myself?”
Wallace grimaced. “Look in the mirror, Jacob. You’re a mess.”
“I think I can manage a flight to Morocco and a chat with some archaeologist.”
“You’ve been in Syria for the past month,” the station chief said. “And the month before that, you were in Lebanon. And the month before that, you were in Iraq.”
“You wanted me to get rid of that Sunni arms running operation and I did. Then you wanted me to eavesdrop on a terrorist nest in Damascus and I did. You can’t really complain.”
“My point is that you’ve been on the front line for far too long.”
“So Morocco will be like a vacation,” Jacob said with a smile. He shouldn’t have smiled. That made his fat lip crack open again.
“Yeah, right. Not with your luck. Look, Jacob. We go way back. Let me tell you not as your boss, but as a friend. You’ve been driving yourself too hard. You need a break.”
“Fine. After I talk to this archaeologist chick, I’ll lounge on the beach near Essaouira for a week or two. Do some kite surfing. Happy?”
“I’ll be happy when we’ve wiped out The Sword of the Righteous.”
“You’re going to have a long wait for happiness then,” Jacob said, picking up the folder and breaking the seal, an act that, for anyone under his level of security clearance, would have earned them ten years in Guantanamo.
“Who is this archaeologist, anyway?” he asked as he pulled out the dossier.
“Dr. Jana Peters.”
Jacob nearly dropped the folder. Wallace must have caught his expression because he asked, “You know her?”
“Yeah,” Jacob mumbled. “I know her.”
Or know of her, at least. I wanted to keep it that way.
Suddenly Jacob regretted being so quick to volunteer to do this mission himself.
His boss’s eyes narrowed. “Is this going to be a problem?”
“No.”
No more of a problem than being captured by terrorists.
Maybe he could convince Wallace to send him back to Syria instead.