Malak climbed into the van in back of the apartment building and drove away with blood dripping onto the steering wheel. Ziv had just grazed her arm, but it felt like a leopard had taken a bite out of it. She couldn’t stop to stanch the bleeding because she was allegedly fleeing from the crazed Eben Lavi, who was probably at this very moment limping out of the apartment building with her blood on his jeans. That was the odd little gadget man with thick black glasses they called X-Ray. “Rub your wound on Eben’s thigh,” he had said. “Otherwise it won’t look realistic.”
Malak smiled despite her desperate situation. She had wiped her wound on the ex-Mossad agent’s leg on the way out the door, with Eben looking as uncomfortable as she felt.
As she fled down the hallway Ziv called out to her in Arabic, “The Leopard found the puppy at a Sonic Drive-In while she and Sean were ordering limeades and burgers.”
If Malak survived the day, which seemed unlikely to her at this point, she would have to sit down with Ziv to find out what else he knew about her twin sister. If Malak had known about the puppy, Elise, Sean, and Amun might still be alive.
About a mile from the apartment she pulled into the parking lot of a drugstore and took her jacket off. In the glove box she found a packet of tissues and bound half the stack to her wound with a strip of cloth torn from one of Elise’s blouses. Elise and Sean had their suitcases in the van and were ready to flee in an instant like the experienced terrorists they were.
Malak wiped the blood off her hand with the rest of the tissues. She looked in the rearview mirror and evaluated her appearance. She was pale and wild-eyed, as if she’d just seen two people murdered before being shot herself. That would never do. The drugstore would have a dozen security cameras. She found a leather jacket in Elise’s bag and slipped painfully into it, then added a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap. Malak didn’t exactly achieve the soccer mom appearance she was hoping for, but it was the best she could do. The trick now would be to get what she needed for her wound before the blood started dripping out of her sleeve again. She got out of the van.
Moving quickly through the store would draw attention to herself, as would making a beeline for the gauze and disinfectant. Malak grabbed a cart as if she had several items to pick up, pausing once in a while to look at something that she didn’t need until she finally arrived at the first-aid aisle. Her bad luck continued. There was a woman there restocking the first-aid shelves.
“Can I help you?”
“Maybe,” Malak said. “My son banged up his knees and elbow last night on a skateboard. He’s fine—we got him all patched up—but I thought I should replenish our first-aid supplies for the next time he does a header.”
“I hate those skateboards,” the woman said. “Kids think they’re immortal these days.”
“They sure do,” Malak said, and started pulling what she needed off the shelf.
“How about that car bomb?” the woman said.
“Horrible!” Malak said without hesitation or the slightest hint that she had been in the car that exploded. “I almost didn’t go out because of it. But what are you going to do?”
“You’re right,” the woman said. “Life goes on. But right here in D.C., I guess nobody’s really safe. Does your husband work downtown?”
“No, thank God. He works in Alexandria.”
Malak grabbed the last thing she needed and put it in her cart. “Thank you for your help.”
“Tell your boy to be more careful on the darn skateboard.”
“Believe me, I have.”
Malak loaded her purchases one-handed onto the checkout belt. As they were being rung up she looked at the prepaid disposable cell phones hanging on a rack near the register.
“Are these any good?” she asked the cashier.
“A lot of people buy them. You get twenty hours of talk time, and you can recharge the minutes with a credit card. At least you always know what your cell phone bill’s going to be.”
“I have a cell phone,” Malak said. “But I’m thinking about getting one for my daughter so I can get a hold of her when I need to.”
The cashier smiled. “I’m sure your daughter would prefer an iPhone, but your pocketbook would prefer one of these.”
“I guess I’ll try one… Well, I guess I’d better take two. My son’s two years younger, and I can’t very well get her one without getting him one.”
“I hear you.”
When Malak got to the van there was blood on the shopping cart handle.
Eben limped out of the apartment building with Malak’s blood on his jeans. He looked up and down the street wildly, knowing he wouldn’t see Malak, but he did spot one of the people watching the building. He was young, maybe eighteen years old, talking on a cell phone as he crossed the street toward the building.
Bad timing, Eben thought.
The boy’s eyes went wide when he saw Eben. He snapped the cell phone closed and turned around, but before he reached the sidewalk Eben was on him. Eben had no choice. A crazed, wounded, rogue Mossad agent, bent on revenge for the death of his brother wouldn’t hesitate to assault someone who might have seen his prey get away. He had no doubt the kid was a member of the ghost cell and was on his phone, talking to his handler, when he saw Eben come out. His handler had probably told him to go up to the apartment to find out what happened.
Eben dragged the boy into an alley, slammed his head against the brick wall a couple of times, then stuck his silenced pistol against the boy’s Adam’s apple.
“I will ask one time. If you answer truthfully I will let you live. If I think you are lying, I will kill you right here, right now. Do you understand?”
The boy nodded and looked like he might faint.
“Where did the woman go?”
“I don’t know.”
Eben cocked his pistol.
“I’m telling the truth! I don’t know!”
Eben waited.
“She ran out of the building and went around back. Maybe she had a car. She looked hurt. Her arm.”
“Good!” Eben said. He reached down, wiped his hand on his thigh, and showed the boy the red smear. “She shot me in the leg.”
He hit the boy in the head with the pistol grip. The boy crumpled to the ground.
I deserve a Tony Award, Eben thought as he limped out of the alley and down the street.
Boone and X-Ray watched the act unfold from the roof of the apartment building. They didn’t see what Eben did to the boy in the alley, but they were relieved when they saw the boy stumbling out of the alley, talking on his cell phone.
“Thought he was a goner,” X-Ray said.
“Eben is smarter than that,” Boone said. “On a different subject, with what Ziv told us about himself, do you think you can find out who he is or who he was?”
X-Ray shrugged. “He didn’t give us much, but I’ll do some data mining and see what I come up with. And speaking of different subjects, there’s something we need that would make our job a lot easier.”
“What’s that?”
“A military-grade surveillance drone.”
“You mean a highly classified multimillion-dollar model airplane?”
“Yep. And I want it off the books. No questions asked if the Department of Defense or Homeland Security picks up its blip.”
“You don’t want much, do you?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll put it to good use.”
“Who’s going to fly it?”
“Me and Vanessa.”
“Ever flown one?”
“Nope. But I’ve been reading up on it.”
Boone called J. R. Culpepper on his private line and told him what was going on. When he finished he asked him for a militarygrade surveillance drone.
“That’s right… No, we don’t need an operator, just the drone, and we want it off the grid. If anyone asks who’s flying it or what it’s doing up in the air, it’s none of their business…” Boone ended the call.
“What did he say?”
“He’s worried about Malak. He thinks she should have pulled the plug, just like I thought she should. I’m not sure there’s going to be an act two.”
“What about the drone?”
“There will be a white trailer parked in front of Blair House in an hour. Inside will be a three-point-five-million-dollar drone and all the electronic gear you need to fly and monitor it. Keys to the trailer will be on top of the right tire. Does the intellimobile have a trailer hitch?”
“Yep.”
The intellimobile was the SOS mobile communication/ surveillance van. It didn’t look like much on the outside, but inside was a tangle of electronic gear worth more than the drone.
“You ever pulled a trailer?”
“No, but Vanessa has.”
The young guy Eben roughed up and his partner crossed the street and walked into the apartment building.
“Guess the curtain’s up on act two,” Boone said. “Come on, Croc. Let’s go to the White House and put on a different kind of show.”
Malak crossed the Potomac into Virginia over the Chain Bridge and went to the house where she had spent the night with the family. She knew no one would be there. Once the ghosts abandoned a house they rarely returned.
She had left the patio door unlocked. She took a long, hot shower and treated her wound, which was still terribly painful. She changed clothes and put the dirty ones in the wash, with the exception of the bloody blouse with the tear in the arm. That would have to be discarded along with her jacket. She carried only two sets of clothes because that was all that would fit in her pack. Leopards had to stay light on their feet…or paws.
As Malak waited for the laundry she made herself two tuna fish sandwiches and ate both of them. The shower, the food, and the peace of her temporary lair went a long way in soothing her raw nerves.
And I will need all the nerve I can muster for this next part, she thought.
She took out one of the disposable cell phones. She was certain Ziv and Dirk were tracking her and knew where she was, or perhaps Ziv had turned this task over to the SOS team, who seemed to have become indispensable. She smiled when she thought of Pat Callaghan and Charlie Norton. Aside from Angela and Roger, they were the two people she missed the most after she became the Leopard. She checked the time on her Seamaster, and her smile broadened.
J. R. Culpepper. She didn’t trust him as much as she did Pat and Charlie, but he was the only politician she’d ever known that hadn’t been corrupted by power. Becoming the president didn’t seemed to have changed this. He’d gone way out on a limb for her. Malak hoped the limb didn’t break and crush them all.
She activated the disposable phone.
Malak couldn’t use her laptop, even though it was in her pack. There were strict procedures to follow if you were wounded. The assumption was that you were on the run without access to a computer and e-mail.
It had been a little over an hour since she’d left the apartment. If Ziv’s theatrics had worked, the cell’s leadership knew that Amun, Elise, and Sean had been executed by Eben Lavi and that the Leopard was wounded. A dozen cryptic calls and e-mails had been sent, but only one or perhaps two people had all of the pieces. These were the people the Leopard was hunting. The only way to find them was to stay on the prowl.
She punched in a number.
“Hey, girl!” a cheerful woman answered. “Can I put you on hold? I’m right in the middle of something. Don’t hang up. We need to talk.”
A couple of seconds later a text message popped up on the display with an address.
The woman came back on. “Sorry. Are you able to make it to the party?”
“Yes,” Malak answered.
“Do you have wheels?”
“Yes.”
“Not too far to drive?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yes.”
“Cool! Expect you in fifteen. Ciao.”
Malak shook her head in wonder at the cell’s brilliant organization. The hip-sounding woman could have been down the street or in Italy. She had no idea who Malak was or what the problem was. If Malak had answered no to any of the questions the woman would have asked another set of cheerful questions and texted her another phone number to call. If Homeland Security had been monitoring the call, which was highly unlikely, they would have completely ignored it.
Malak turned off the phone, then took it outside to the concrete patio and stomped on it several times. She put the pieces into a heavy-duty garbage bag she’d found in the cabinet under the sink, along with her bullet-grazed blouse and jacket. She took her pack and the bag into the garage and tossed them into the van.
On the way to the address she stopped at a Starbucks, threw the garbage bag into a trash can, then walked in and ordered a latte.
Five minutes later Malak was parked outside a doctor’s office in Langley, Virginia. She wondered how the CIA would feel if they knew there was a terrorist physician almost within spitting distance of their headquarters. The cell was not only brilliantly organized, they were bold, or in this case maybe even a little reckless.
Malak sat in the van for several minutes, sipping her latte as she scanned the streets, cars, and buildings. If someone had followed her or was watching the doctor’s office, she didn’t see them, which meant they were either very good or they weren’t there.
She got out of the van and walked into the office. No patients, no receptionist, no nurse—just a saltwater tank filled with brightly colored fish. A young doctor wearing blue scrubs opened a door near the reception area. The name tag pinned to his scrubs said “Dr. Lennox.” When he saw her he looked confused, then worried.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “If you need an appointment, you can call during—”
“I have an appointment,” Malak said. “You were told to expect me.”
“But I was told the patient was seriously—”
“Looks can be deceiving. And I’m tougher than I look. Let’s get this over with. It’s dangerous for me to stay in one place too long. Dangerous for you too.”
Dr. Lennox started sweating. It could mean that this was the first time he’d been called upon to stitch up a terrorist. Or it could mean something else. Like the young doctor in the blue scrubs was setting her up with the bad guys or the good guys down the street at the CIA. Neither of which would be good. Malak put her right hand in Elise’s jacket pocket and wrapped it around her pistol grip.
“Follow me,” Dr. Lennox said.
He led her into a sterile room in back with an examination table.
“Take your jacket off and lie down on the table.”
“I’ll sit on the table,” Malak said.
She pulled out her gun and put it on the paper-covered table, then took off the jacket, wincing in pain as she pulled her left arm out of the sleeve.
Dr. Lennox stared at the gun. “That makes me nervous.”
“Good,” Malak said. “You make me nervous.”
“I’d be a lot more comfortable if—”
“Your comfort isn’t my concern. Is this the first time you’ve done this?”
“Yes,” Dr. Lennox admitted.
“It’s pretty simple,” Malak said. “Patch me up and don’t ask any questions. And do it quickly. I’m in a hurry.” She pushed herself up onto the table with one arm, the gun next to her right hand.
Dr. Lennox pulled a bright light over and then unwound the bloody bandage around her left triceps. As he examined the gash he dabbed the blood away.
“It’s pretty deep,” he said. “And there are pieces of cloth embedded in it. I can irrigate and disinfect the wound, and put in some sutures, but I’m going to have to numb the area first.”
“Fine.”
Dr. Lennox walked over to a counter and filled a large syringe, then came back. “I’m going to administer several small injections around the wound with a local anesthetic called lidocaine.”
“Go ahead,” Malak said. “But if there’s something in that syringe besides lidocaine that starts to makes me dizzy like a sedative, they’ll find both of us on the floor and you won’t be getting up.”
Dr. Lennox’s hand trembled. “It’s lidocaine.”
Malak picked up her gun. “It’s a nine millimeter.” Her hand was steady as a rock.
Dr. Lennox took a deep breath and began numbing the flesh around the Leopard’s wound.
Make It Look Good
We headed down to the East Room, allegedly to see how the preparations were going for the concert, but the real reason was that Angela wanted to find out from Boone how her mother was. This was not going to be easy with P.K. sticking to us like the stars on Old Glory. He was growing more suspicious by the minute. He’d asked us three times if Charlie Norton had really taken us to the National Museum of Natural History. When we swore that he had, P.K. rolled his green eyes like we were the biggest liars on the planet. The kid had good instincts, just like his dad.
When we got to the East Room so many people were there that I thought my new watch was broken and the concert had already started, but of course it hadn’t. Most of the people running around worked for the White House. The others worked for our parents’ band, Match.
“Looks like the Secret Service let the roadies in,” I said, doing a quick head count. “They’re all here except for one.”
“Yeah,” Angela said. “He’s probably still in jail.”
Buddy T. spotted us and stomped over like he was going to knock us down.
“Where’s Boone? What are you doing here?”
Angela and I took a half step backward and said we had no idea where Boone was.
P.K. took a half step forward and said, “I live here. This is my house.”
“That right?” Buddy T. said. “For your information, this house belongs to the people of the United States. You’re just a renter.”
P.K. thought about this for a moment, then gave Buddy T. a small smile and looked at us. “I thought you said your parents’ manager was a pain in the butt?”
“We didn’t say that,” Angela said.
Actually we hadn’t even mentioned Buddy T. to P.K., but if we had we would have described him exactly like that.
“He seems okay to me,” P.K. said. “In fact, I like him. So would my dad.”
I saw something I never thought I’d see. Buddy T. actually blushed. And that’s when I knew that Willingham Culpepper could one day become the president of the United States if he wanted to. He had the charm and the guile for the job.
“I think your dad does like me,” Buddy T. said, recovering some of his normal bluster. “He caved and let my roadies in.”
J.R. did not cave—at least not to Buddy T.
“What’s the T stand for?” P.K. asked.
“That’s above your security clearance, kid,” Buddy T. said with a smile, then walked off to yell at someone else.
Heather Hughes—tall, blonde, already dressed for the concert, and the president of our parents’ record company—walked over to us. We introduced her to P.K.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Will,” she said, and then looked around the room. “It took me an hour to get through the gate. Soldiers and police everywhere.”
“It’s just a precaution because of the car bomb,” P.K. said.
“Scary,” Heather said. “I was in the air when it went off. They closed the airport. I didn’t know if they’d reopen it in time for me to get here.” She looked around the chaotic room. “Where’s Boone?”
“Seems like a president of a record company would be more concerned about her musicians than she would about an old roadie with a gray braid,” P.K. said.
Heather smiled. “You have a point, Will. But I’ve known Boone for more than thirty years. He’s one of my dearest friends. The Secret Service said Blaze and Roger were up in the Residence. I checked the motor coach on my way in for Boone, and he wasn’t there. One of the agents said that he and Croc had gone downtown. I called his cell. He didn’t answer. I want to make sure he’s okay.”
P.K. was about to say something else when Boone and Croc entered the East Room. They walked over to us.
“How y’all doin’?”
Boone’s drawl was back.
“I was worried,” Heather said.
“’Bout what? The bomb? I wasn’t anywhere near it when it went off. Bet you’re hungry after that long flight from the West Coast.” He looked at P.K. “You think you can escort this poor starvin’ woman to the kitchen and talk them into gettin’ her something to eat?”
“I guess so,” P.K. said. It was obvious that he wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but he was too polite to say no. “What kind of dog is that?”
“A very old dog,” Boone said.
“A blue heeler–border collie cross,” I said.
“He’s missing some teeth,” P.K. said.
“Yep, quite a pile of ‘em in fact,” Boone said.
“Let’s get some food,’ Heather said.
“Try the fried cheese curds,” I suggested as they walked out of the East Room.
Boone motioned us over to the only corner that wasn’t swarming with people.
“Malak is fine,” Boone said quietly. “She’s inside a doctor’s office right now, getting her arm stitched up. I’m not saying she isn’t hurting, but it was only a graze. We had to make it look good.”
“Are you sure it’s going to work?” Angela asked. Charlie had told us about the charade they had put on at the apartment.
Boone sighed. “If they believe her, she’ll be fine. If they don’t…”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. The rest of it was written all over Angela’s face.
“Why didn’t she just give it up?” Angela asked. “Her cover’s blown.”
“Not quite,” Boone said. “But I agree with you. The game she’s playing now is more dangerous than the one she was playing this morning. It’s a gamble. But everyone who suspected she wasn’t the Leopard is dead. The alternative is to be on the run for the rest of her life. And this includes you and Q and your parents. If the ghost cell finds out that your mother is an imposter, it won’t take them long to discover that she’s Malak Tucker, former Secret Service agent, mother to Angela Tucker, the allegedly deceased wife of Roger Tucker,” and—he looked at me—“the stepmother to Quest Munoz. They’ll come after all of you.”
They’d probably come after Boone and the SOS team as well.
“Who made it look good?” I asked.
“What?” Boone said.
“Who shot Malak in the arm?” I’d been thinking about this ever since Charlie told us about it. It seemed incredible to me that someone would shoot Malak to “make it look good.” And how do you just stand there and say, “Okay, shoot me in the arm. I’m ready.”
“Ziv,” Boone said. “And there’s something else you need to know that I didn’t tell Charlie. I thought I should tell you personally.” He looked at Angela. “Let’s go out to the motor coach.”
That didn’t sound good.
Halfway across the East Room we were intercepted by a shouting Buddy T.
“Where have you been, Boone?”
“Takin’ care of business,” Boone answered calmly.
“In case you didn’t notice, we’re putting a benefit concert together for the president of the United States and some of his friends.”
Boone smiled. “Looks like you got plenty of help. You’re only missin’ one roadie, and he was a complete slacker. No one was sorry to see him hauled off to the can. I signed on as the driver and to ride herd over security.”
“The motor coach isn’t going anywhere until after the concert. About a third of the people in here are Secret Service Agents with guns. I doubt they need your assistance with security. I feel pretty safe. How about you?”
Boone and Croc locked eyes with Buddy T. “I always feel pretty safe,” Boone said.
Croc growled. Buddy T. took a step backward. “Did they give you permission to bring that mutt in here?”
Boone nodded. “Right after I gave J. R. Culpepper a tour of the motor coach and asked him to let the roadies into the White House.”
“Oh,” Buddy T. said, obviously disappointed, but he didn’t let that bother him for more than a second. “You need to give these guys a hand. The concert was on, then it was off, and now it’s back on. We’re way behind, and it’s going to be televised. It’ll be embarrassing if we don’t pull this off perfectly.”
“Can’t have that,” Boone said. “Tell you what. I’ll take these two to the coach to change their clothes. Can’t have them dressed like they are now. Might embarrass people. Then I’ll come back in and lend a hand.”
Grandpa
Boone started brewing a pot of coffee while Angela and I changed into concert-at-the-White-House clothes. Mine looked pretty much like what I had taken off—cargo pants, shirt, running shoes. But they were clean. Angela’s looked pretty much the same as well: black jeans, black sweater, gold necklace with an angel on it exactly like the one her mother wore, except Malak had a gold leopard strung on hers next to the angel.
We sat down in the plush leather chairs around the coach’s rosewood dining table. Croc crawled under the table and started snorting around for complex protein, but he was destined for disappointment. The coach was a no-meat zone except for the odd burger Angela and I managed to smuggle in when Mom and Roger were conked out in the master bedroom in the back. If a little crumb was to drop from the illicit toxic burger, we would have dived to the floor and fought over it like hungry hyenas.
“Tell us what’s going on,” Angela said.
“You know your mother was adopted?” Boone said.
“Of course,” Angela said. “They disowned her, or she disowned them, when she refused the arranged marriage they set up for her.” She bit her lower lip.
I was nervous too, but taking a deck of cards out and messing around with them was more annoying than lower-lip biting. The deck stayed in my pocket.
“I met her real father today,” Boone said. “You know him as Ziv.”
The monkey that watches the leopard’s tail, the Philadelphia cop in Independence Park. Warren Parker, aka Grandpa.
Angela said nothing, but I thought she might chew her lower lip off.
“So,” I said. “Malak’s dad shot her in the arm.”
Boone nodded.
“What kind of father would shoot his daughter?”
“Once Malak decided to stay in play, he really didn’t have much of a choice,” Boone answered. “He winged her to keep her alive.”
Angela was still silent, but I’m sure her mind was traveling at Mach 10, trying to wrap itself around this new revelation… or new relation. We knew for a fact that Grandpa Ziv had murdered at least four people, counting the terrorist in Tijuana, Mexico, who had murdered Eben’s brother. I wondered if Eben had thanked Ziv for this. Probably not.
“Would you have winged her?” I asked.
Boone hesitated a second, then said, “Yes.”
I shook my head in wonder.
“How long has Ziv known?” Angela asked. “How long has she known?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t have much time to talk after he”—Boone glanced at me—“winged her. But he did tell us how he met Elise.”
The details were a little sketchy, but Ziv (no last name, not his real first name) met the now-deceased Elise in Lebanon when he was a university student. They had both been recruited by the same organization.
“What organization?” I asked.
“He didn’t say,” Boone answered. “But there’s no doubt it was a radical Islamic group. Probably a splinter group of Hezbollah—party of God. He was at a training camp in Iran when his wife died during childbirth. Ziv didn’t find out about her death until he returned to Lebanon. By then she’d been dead nearly a year. They didn’t tell him there had been twins. They told him that a girl had been born, but that she had died too. Ziv believed them and spent the next decade coordinating terrorist activities around the world with great success.”
Boone reached down and scratched Croc on the head as the motor coach began to fill with the aroma of strong coffee.
“Let me tell you how I define success,” he continued. “And this applies to both the good guys and bad guys. A successful mission is one that causes the most amount of damage to your enemy, and when it’s over no one has the slightest suspicion that you had anything to do with it.”
“Like when you were a NOC agent for the CIA,” Angela said.
“Right.”
NOC stands for “nonofficial cover.” Before he retired from the CIA Boone was a NOC agent posing as a roadie. If he’d been caught spying, the CIA would have denied ever knowing him. Whatever jam he was in he would have to get out of on his own.
Boone got up, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat back down. He took a sip and then continued with the story.
“Ziv heard a rumor about a secret cell that had been formed around the time his wife died. It was made up of elite terrorists, and you got in by invitation only. He began to wonder why he hadn’t been invited to join. Then he started thinking about Elise and some of his other friends who had been recruited when they were at the university. At least half of them seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. Elise had been a good friend to both Ziv and his wife. She would have been at the hospital when his wife went into labor. He wondered why she hadn’t contacted him when he returned from Iran.
“He got into the hospital’s records and discovered that his wife had died giving birth to twins. Girls. Identical. The record went on to say that the father of the twins was deceased. The girls were adopted the day they were born. The names of the adoptive parents weren’t given.”
“So he started looking for them,” Angela said.
“More than that,” Boone said. “He faked his own death, very much like your mother did when she took Anmar’s place. Like her, he also defected to the other side, becoming a NOC agent for the Israeli Mossad. At least that’s what we think. This was the only way he could find out what the Mossad knew about this secret cell. This was also how he managed to infiltrate Eben’s mission to track down the Leopard and kill her.”
“Did he find Anmar before she died at Independence Hall?” Angela asked.
“He didn’t say, but I suspect he did. He knew things about Anmar’s past that Malak didn’t know.”
“This is confusing,” I said, and I wasn’t embarrassed to admit it.
Boone smiled. “It’s supposed to be confusing, Q. Life is not two sheets of paper, one black, one white. Life is a ream of paper, each page a different shade of gray.”
That was about as poetic as Boone had ever been. And I was still confused.
He looked at Angela. “One thing I know for sure, Ziv will do everything he can to protect you and your mother.”
I wanted to shout, What about me?Instead I said, “Malak’s not making it easy for him.”
“True,” Boone said. “But she’s getting him closer to his goal, which is finding the people who kidnapped his daughters.”
“So he’s definitely on our side,” Angela said.
Boone shook his head. “Your grandfather is on whichever side suits his purpose.”
Dr. Lennox finished suturing the wound and then wrapped it.
“Do you want a sling?”
Malak nodded. Slings, bandages, and casts attracted attention. But a sling was also a good place to stash a small pistol.
Dr. Lennox handed her a vial of pills.
“Antibiotics,” he said. “Not poison capsules. Take two a day. It’s a nasty wound. If it gets infected you could lose your arm.”
Malak stuffed the bottle into her pack and hopped off the table with the gun in her hand.
“Don’t worry, Doc. I’m not going to shoot you. The next time you have to patch up someone like me, it will be easier. You can get used to anything. Even patients brandishing pistols.”
“I suppose,” Dr. Lennox said, but he didn’t look like he believed her.
Before leaving the examination room Malak locked eyes with the young doctor until he looked away. The stare was meant to intimidate, but it was also a small indulgence that helped to remind her whose side she was on.
When she met a new cell member, no matter how insignificant their role, Malak imagined herself throwing them to the ground, wrenching their arms behind their back, and cuffing them—not too gently—as she placed them under arrest.
Malak knew this was pure fantasy. She and Ziv had identified dozens of cell members. When the other members were finally apprehended it would be by a coordinated operation involving several law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They would hit the ghosts at the same moment, and it was unlikely that she would be in on any of the arrests. She was no longer a Secret Service agent, and she was no longer herself. The Leopard would be in an interrogation room, a cage, or lying in a stainless steel drawer in a morgue.
Malak left the examination room and clinic without looking back.
Elise’s van was gone. In its place was an SUV. Silver with tinted windows.
The back door swung open. Without hesitation Malak crossed the street, climbed into the backseat, and closed the door.
Two men in front, who did not turn to look at her. One behind her, who slipped a black hood over her head. “Gun,” he said.
“It’s in the pack,” she said.
He took the pack and rummaged through it. The SUV pulled away from the curb.
This was not the first time Malak had been hooded. She didn’t like it, but she understood the precaution. They didn’t trust her yet. They were taking her to a secret location. If they were going to torture and kill her, they probably wouldn’t have bothered with the hood. Dead people don’t talk. They had allowed her to get into the SUV on her own. The man in back had not patted her down for a backup weapon. All good signs.
Malak had noted the time when she got into the SUV, but that would do her little good in figuring out where they had taken her. Terrorists rarely took a direct route anywhere. They might drive for an hour to get to a location three blocks from where they started.
She said nothing. People who were nervous talked. People who didn’t talk made other people nervous.