Chapter 7

When dawn finally came, the rain had stopped and the fog had gone away. But all was still not right with the world. Ryder Long could feel it in his bones.

He hadn’t slept a wink, not unusual, as he rarely slept anymore. Sleeping meant dreams, and his dreams were haunted by memories. They could be so painful, sometimes it was just better to stay awake.

He eased himself off the bed now, just as the first bit of sunlight peeked through the dirty window. His boots made only a minimum of noise when they touched the creaky floor. He’d spent a lot of time in this room off and on in the past few nights; he was getting good at working the planks by now. He was, after all, a ghost. He glanced out the window and groaned. The sky above was bright, bright red.

“I knew it,” he whispered.

Red skies in the morning were never a good sign.

He moved across the floor to the other, much larger, much dirtier window. Here he found Li, head down on the massive sill, finally sound asleep. He leaned over for no better reason than to get a good look at her up close, his first, really, since coming here.

“Wow! …” he exclaimed, much too loudly. She really was gorgeous.

Ryder was tempted to lift her head and put a pillow under it—others in the team had moved her before without waking her. But it wasn’t in him to disturb such a sleeping beauty. He moved silently across the room instead, going out the door with the skill of a cat burglar.

He stepped out into the hallway, wondering if there was any semblance of breakfast in the offing. One sniff of the same old musty air told him no. He wandered down the hall and stuck his head into the master bedroom. Here he found the rest of the team. They were no longer gathered around the computer like a den of Cub Scouts on steroids, though. Just the opposite. The place looked like a bomb had hit it, with bodies scattered everywhere.

Ozzi was lying half off the bed, just staring up at the ceiling. Fox was slumped in a corner, head down on his knees. Gallant was beside him, hands together, as if in prayer. Even Hunn and Puglisi looked wiped out. Their wet clothes still drying in front of a dangerously old-looking space heater, they were sitting close by the window, in their underwear, their M15 weapons at ready, should anyone come down the reservoir extension road.

But it was Bates who looked the worst. Eyes red, jaw clenched. Punked hair more out of control than usual. Still sitting in front of the computer, only he turned around to look at Ryder.

“What’s the matter with you guys?” the pilot asked the whiz kid.

Bates just shook his head. “You missed a long night. That and the fact that we just found out we might have bitten off more than we can chew in this whole thing.”

“Just give me the highlights,” Ryder told him.

Bates ran his hands through his hair and took a deep breath, trying to stay awake. “You know that personal organizer Hunn and Pugs took off the French guy?” he asked Ryder.

“Yeah, sure, the PDA,” Ryder said back. “Aren’t you supposed to be trying to break into it? I mean, that’s one of the reasons we’re up here … .”

Bates just nodded. “Well, I cracked it, all right,” he said. “It took me four freaking hours. But what we saw when I did …”

Ryder studied the kid for a moment. He’d known him since way before the Hormuz Incident. Like Ryder, Bates was one of the original members of the rogue team. And despite their varied backgrounds and ages, because of all they’d gone through together the original guys were as tight as brothers by now.

But Ryder had never seen Bates look like this. What could he have seen inside the PDA that would twist him up so?

“Show me,” Ryder finally told him. “Show me what you found.”

Bates sat Ryder down in front of Li’s laptop and pointed to the “Fast Ball” and “Slow Curve” files.

“Get a load of these first,” Bates told him. “You’ll need the info to appreciate what comes next.”

Ryder read the files quickly. The interrogations. The top-secret classifications. The story of Georgie Mann. At the end of them, though, Ryder actually felt relieved, especially by what he’d seen on “Fast Ball.”

“Well, at least we’ve got something on record that says we warned those assholes about the missiles being smuggled into the U.S.,” he said. “It’s just too bad this poor bastard Mann had to take two in the hat to prove we were right”

Bates almost laughed. “All that’s just the beginning, Colonel,” he said. “The water gets a lot deeper from here on in”

Using his own laptop now, Bates showed Ryder how he had hooked up Palm Tree’s PDA to what he called a drain line. It was a gadget that was able to literally suck information out of the DGSE agent’s device.

Bates went on: “The problem was, his little PDA turned out to be loaded with memory chips. Hundreds of them. They added up to almost a gig. And they were able to hold tons of stuff.”

“Seems like overkill,” Ryder said, as if he knew what Bates was talking about, which he didn’t.

“It was,” Bates replied. “But that was the whole idea. He filled most of his memory up with totally useless crap. Stuff like the entire French dictionary. And the four phone books of Paris. The individual results of every person ever to race in the Tour de France. On and on and on … .”

“All this was camouflage?” Ryder asked.

“Exactly,” Bates replied. “Hiding the real stuff by putting tons of nonsense in front of it. On top of it. All around it. And then he set up so many security codes protecting these files, even the most hopped-up cyberfreak would give up trying to break through.”

“But you succeeded, right?” Ryder asked.

“It was like peeling back the layers of the mother of all onions,” Bates replied. “That and lots of typing. And retyping. But yeah, I finally got through, to the stuff that asshole was hiding in there. And this is what I found … .”

He showed Ryder the first attachment he’d come upon after getting through all the security diversions. It was marked, in English, “Travel Plans.”

“I was immediately suspicious of this,” Bates explained, “because it contains nearly a hundred megs of data. That’s much more than a normal person would have in a file labeled ‘Travel Plans.’”

And Bates was right. The file didn’t contain travel plans. In fact, all Ryder saw was reams of numbers with names beside them.

“The numbers represent payments going in and out of a bunch of Swiss bank accounts,” Bates explained. “The names are the beneficiaries of these transactions. Look at this one: ‘Monsieur A. L. Zeke.’”

Ryder laughed out loud. Even he knew this was a very lame anagram for Kazeel, as in Abdul Kazeel, top Al Qaeda mook and a victim of the rogue team’s brutal justice not long ago.

Bates ran down the length of the file. More numbers, more fake names, more transaction confirmations. It was all moving too fast for Ryder. But Bates explained that by connecting all the dots he was able to determine that Palm Tree and, by association, the French government not only transferred funds to Al Qaeda for the Stinger missile purchases but also had arranged for the missiles’ shipment out of the Philippines, as well as their smuggling into the United States, including an inspection-free port of entry in LA.

It was dramatic stuff, but truthfully, Ryder wasn’t surprised by any of it. They’d all come to know that Palm Tree had blood on his hands. That’s why the team had popped him.

Bates then showed Ryder another file, one that traced another money trail that proved Palm Tree and Kazeel had paid for the Stinger missiles first and then their launchers. This confirmed another suspicion held by the ghosts, that the weapons had actually been bought in two separate purchases. The launchers they knew came from an Iraqi arms dealer named Bahzi; he, too, was later whacked by the ghost team. But where did the missiles themselves come from? Or more important, how was such a large number procured for the terrorists, via Palm Tree?

“Remember now, these are American-made weapons,” Bates told Ryder. “And I might be wrong, but I think that while the launchers can last awhile, the missiles only work well if they are up-to-date. Those missiles in the Mann photo look to be the latest model. And believe me, the Pentagon keeps close tabs on where they all are. Am I right, Major Fox?”

Still slumped in the corner, Fox replied in a mumble, “That was one of our main jobs at DSA: keep track of all weapons, big or small. For thirty-six brand-new Stingers to suddenly go missing, without a trace, means that French asshole must have had some help inside the U.S. military. Deep inside.”

Ryder just shook his head. They had all discussed such a possibility before, so again, it was no surprise. “But who?” he asked now. “Who in Higher Authority would have gotten in bed with these guys?”

“You really want to know?” Bates asked him cryptically.

Before Ryder could reply, the whiz kid began banging on his keyboard again, retrieving yet another bonanza: a list of Palm Tree’s phone calls for the past two months.

Ryder was surprised. “What were they doing in his personal organizer? I thought these spy types didn’t like to leave evidence of who they’ve been talking to … .”

Bates smiled grimly. “Usually they don’t,” he said. “And for sure, I just assumed this guy would be like the mooks. You know, shedding cell phones on an hourly basis? But believe it or not, he used the PDA to dial for him.”

Ryder was stumped. “Why?”

Bates just shrugged. “Too lazy to dial it himself, I guess,” he said. “Or maybe he wanted to keep track of who he was calling, thinking that no one would ever get into his pants like this. But it was an amazingly stupid thing to do, because no matter how many cell phones he used, the PDA kept track of all his calls.”

Bates showed Ryder the long list he’d recovered. It looked just like a phone bill, details of who was called and for how long they talked. There were lots of phone calls to car rental agencies and restaurants.

“But look at this number,” Bates told him, pointing to the screen. “This is where it gets really weird.”

There was indeed a certain number—011-333-0001—that had been dialed several times over the past few weeks but had been cut off before it ever made a connection, almost as if every time the caller thought better of what he was doing. Or was sending some kind of signal.

That the number had the area exchange 011 was the surprising thing. Bates explained that when he worked at the NSA, before he joined the rogue team, he was told many tip-top-secret things. Like that area code 011 was a secret phone exchange used exclusively by the White House. And that the next three numbers—333—were used for secure phones in the White House offices reserved for the National Security Council. And that the last four numbers—0001—indicated that this particular phone was the first in a line of many.

“So, ponder this,” Bates concluded. “Why would a French intelligence agent, one with a very dirty past, and obviously out to fuck over the U.S., have the number for someone in the NSC office at the White House?”

Ryder just shrugged. “These numbers have to be closely held secrets, right?”

Bates replied, “Are they ever. My boss at the NSA used to keep them in a nuclear blastproof safe. That’s how secret they were. No one I know would have been stupid enough to let one out in such an unsecured location as a cell phone or a personal organizer. In fact, you’re supposed to keep them in your head.”

“Well, then who the hell was this French asshole calling at the White House?” Ryder asked.

Bates smiled grimly again. Then he handed Ryder a clean cell phone and said, “See for yourself.”

Ryder understood right away. They had done this type of thing before. He punched in the number.

A woman answered.

She said, “General Rushton’s office.”

That was it.

The smoking gun …

 

General James Trimble Rushton.

Special Assistant to the President on military special ops. Longtime senior adviser to the NSC. One of the few people in Washington with access to the Oval Office day and night, 24/7.

He was also a disturbingly incompetent human being, who knew almost nothing about the military or special ops yet frequently ran roughshod over both. Arrogant, effete, and patently dishonest, Rushton nevertheless held great sway inside the Beltway and especially on the NSC. When he spoke, he was usually speaking in bono vox on the NSC’s behalf.

What was his connection to all this?

Plenty … .

It was Rushton who’d sent Fox on his last mission, which was to track down the rogue team right after their dramatic rescue in Singapore. He’d dispatched Fox not to bring the rogues back to justice, however, but to enlist their aid in locating a downed B-2 bomber that, they would all come to suspect, was somehow tied up in the Stinger missile deal, too. In fact, the Stealth plane might have been carrying the missiles themselves, a frightening prospect that would mean the Stingers had come directly from America and then been handed to the terrorists. At the very least the weapons might have spent some time in the cargo bay of the specially adapted B-2F bomber.

And indeed, the rogue team found the missing B-2 crashed on a very isolated island off the northern coast of the Philippines. But when they did, Rushton first ordered Fox to inspect its bomb bay and, after finding it empty, told him to pinpoint the billion-dollar bomber’s exact location—so it could be destroyed by a massive cruise missile attack. Tellingly, after this was done Rushton cut off all communication with Fox, leaving him stranded with most of the rogue team on the very small practically prehistoric Filipino island. Very unusual behavior, for sure.

But that was not the end of Rushton’s involvement. Hardly. It was Rushton and a jackboot unit of Green Berets who stopped the rogue team in their tracks just before they were able to catch up with the shipment of Stingers leaving Manila. It was Rushton who took the team into custody, whisking them aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and locking them up in separate brigs like a bunch of convicted felons. It was Rushton who led the interrogations spelled out in the file called “Fast Ball.” It was Rushton who tried so hard to get the members of the team to flip. And failing that, it was Rushton who sent them all to Gitmo, vowing that none of them would ever set foot in the United States again.

After all that, the team couldn’t help but suspect him of somehow being mixed up in the Stinger affair. But now they had a definite link between him and the agent Palm Tree. This smoking gun was still red-hot.

And again, Ryder thought this was a good thing. Certainly it was clear from everything he’d seen that the terrorists had managed to buy the missiles and get them into the U.S. with some high-level help. But if the terrorists and their missiles were riding around in Greyhound buses, well, all the government had to do was put out an APB for law enforcement everywhere to simply stop and search every Greyhound bus, wherever they may be. Or better yet, the government could order the Greyhound company to simply freeze all its buses in place, just as all airline flights were frozen in the hours and days after 9/11. All it would take was a few calls from the NSC, via the Homeland Security department, and the terrorists’ buses could be found in no time. Heroes again, the ghosts could then explain their own outlaw situation to someone higher up and stop this life on the run before it even started.

Simple, right?

“Wrong,” Bates told him, even before Ryder could blurt it all out. “Take a look at this … .”

Going even deeper into Palm Tree’s hidden files, Bates retrieved a very top-secret NSC operations memo, something that Rushton had obviously turned over to the French spy. In this memo Rushton stated that “only cognizant threats to homeland security identified by me will be given priority for any follow-up discussion or investigation.” His rationale was that the country’s intelligence services were barraged with rumors and tips about pending terrorist actions in the country every day, many of which were dead ends. This was a massive case of overload, and Rushton had taken it upon himself to sort it out by determining which threats were real and which were not. Only he would decide which threats were important enough to be looked into. Only he would direct the response if a terrorist attack should happen inside the United States. And in fact, these orders were written under a so-called national security directive, something that was just one step below an executive order from the President himself.

As if to prove the point, Rushton ended the top-secret memo by saying: “All threats involving ground transport vehicles, including cars, trucks, and buses, will be given low priority for the time being.”

“This is fucking treason!” Ryder roared. “This guy is setting it up so the mooks can do just about anything they want.”

“Exactly,” Bates replied soberly.

Ryder looked around the room again. The rest of the team had stayed nearly silent the entire time he’d been here. Now he knew why. Rushton was in this thing up to his beady eyeballs. Not only had he laid out the perfect conditions for the terrorists to move about the country freely, at least for a few days, to do their dirty work, but he’d also rigged it so even when airliners started getting shot down he would be in a position to steer any investigations in other directions, away from what the terrorists were really up to.

“This guy has suddenly become a very powerful person,” Bates said. “And in doing so he’s covered all the angles. And his actions are so outrageous, it would take days, weeks, or even longer for us, or anyone, to convince people that all of this is real. And by that time, it will be too late. I mean, who is going to believe one of the top military officers in the country is in league with the terrorists? Especially if it’s us—outlaws ourselves—who are the first to blow the whistle on him? They’ll lock us up again and it will be months before we could even get a peep out. Just the fact that we have this information irreversibly taints it.”

He paused. The room suddenly grew dark. Outside, the sky had turned deep bloodred.

“You know, something like this could never have happened in this country ten years ago,” Bates said, his voice low. “Or even five years. But with 9/11, and everything’s that’s happened since, abuses of the Patriot Act, the CIA and the FBI running around with their heads cut off, Iraq … shit, a guy like Rushton was able to come out of nowhere and fill a vacuum. And this is the result.”

Ryder just shook his head. What a fucking mess … .

“But why is he doing it?” he asked. “Why is he committing such high treason against the country?”

Bates just shrugged. “It’s usually money, Colonel,” he said. “Though, for some reason, I think this guy has motives even deeper than that. He’s not just powerful. He’s arrogant. And downright evil. But he’s not a fool. How we could wish he was. If he was willing to do all this back and forth with the asshole Frenchman, that tells me he’ll stop at nothing to see his agenda through, whatever it may be. And that will include finding us once he realizes we’re not all dead. God, he could send the entire 82nd Airborne after us and no one would blink an eye.”

“In other words,” Ozzi moaned, suddenly coming to life nearby, “we’re screwed.”

Fox, too, was suddenly back among the living. He got to his feet, walked over to the computer, and, without asking, took a cigarette from Ryder’s dwindling pack.

“Now show him the really bad news,” Fox told Bates.

Ryder slumped farther into his seat. “There’s more?” he moaned.

Fox lit his purloined butt and let out a long stream of smoke.

“Oh yeah,” he said drily. “A lot more … .”

 

The rest of the team grudgingly revived themselves at this point. Gallant retreated downstairs to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee from the last of Li’s Maxwell House. There weren’t enough clean cups, though. So they had to drink the coffee out of milk glasses.

Bates meanwhile never stopped typing, noisily slurping his liquid caffeine as he retrieved yet another of Palm Tree’s hidden files. This one, particularly large, was titled “Family Photos.”

“Here’s our next very real screwy thing,” Bates announced.

It, too, was chock-full of what seemed to be useless data taking up space. Still sitting beside Bates, sipping his own glass of coffee, Ryder watched a parade of Palm Tree’s “family” pass by in the form of JPEG photos. Mum-mère. Pa-pa. Mon frère. Mon sœur. Dozens of kids and aunts and uncles, big noses, dirty faces, rotten teeth, most likely none of them even remotely related to the DGSE agent. But why was Bates forcing Ryder to endure this gallery of Gauls, flipping by at a rate of about five a second? He was about to ask when Bates alerted him to a series of photos coming up that depicted an old lady visiting the island of Capri. Dozens of these images were soon flipping by, moving faster than a slide projector on speed.

“What is this?” Ryder finally demanded to know. “He took pictures of someone’s grandma at the beach. What’s the big deal?”

“Just watch,” Bates told him, manipulating the keyboard to get the images to move even faster. Suddenly one white blotch appeared among the flipping photos. It went by so quickly, Ryder hardly noticed it. But Bates had caught it. Now he isolated it.

“Check it out,” he told Ryder.

It was not a photo, but what was it? Ryder had to study the image for a few seconds before he realized he was looking at a photo of a napkin, one with a very crude drawing scribbled on it. The napkin had a large brown coffee stain in its upper right-hand corner, along with, oddly enough, the impression of two coins, embedded beneath the stain.

With all the artistry of a six-year-old, the drawing appeared to show a collection of things in flight, both big and small, traveling over what might have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people but, tellingly, no buildings. Because of the large stain and the imprint of the coins, though, it was difficult to count just how many of these flying things were being depicted. There may have been at least a dozen. But what were they flying over?

Groggy from his night of nonsleep, Ryder still failed to see the relevance of the image. “OK, so when he took Grandma’s picture at the beach in Capri, he bought her something, an expensive espresso, no doubt. This is her napkin. And she scribbled on it. So what?”

But Bates just shook his head. “No,” he insisted. “This is a very special thing. Think about it. It has to be. That French bastard wouldn’t have stuck it in the middle of this humongous file and then surrounded it with a galaxy of security stuff if it wasn’t important, right? I mean, he was hiding it in a place that if anyone actually got in, they’d get so sick of looking at two hundred images of toothless Granny there, they’d probably give up and move on.”

Ryder thought about all that for a moment, then nodded. He had to agree.

“Now, see that logo on the napkin?” Bates asked him. “It’s in English. It’s from a place called Drive, Shop ’n Go.”

He began pounding on a second laptop nearby doing a Google search under that name. The information that popped up indicated that “Drive, Shop ’n Go” was a chain of 7-Eleven-type stores located throughout the eastern part of New Jersey.

“And those two coins?” Bates asked, manipulating the screen to zoom in on that part of the napkin. “They’re nickels, see?”

Again Ryder had to agree. Clearly the coinage was American.

“OK, so first of all, we know this napkin isn’t from Capri but from somewhere in Jersey,” Bates said.

Ryder nodded again. He tried to study the drawing in this new light, but it was hard to do. The most primitive caveman art put this thing to shame.

“Well, if those winged things in the air are supposed to be airplanes,” Ryder said, “then it’s a drawing of an extra-busy airport.”

But again Bates was shaking his head. “There isn’t an airport in the world that would have that many airplanes in the air over it at the same time,” he said. “Plus look: they’re all going in the same direction.”

“Well, maybe it’s a bunch of crude time lapses, you know?” Ryder said. “Showing a bunch of airplanes in the process of taking off and landing, but at different time intervals.”

But Bates wasn’t buying that. Neither were the rest of the team now gathered back around them.

The disturbing thing was, in the lowest part of the right-hand corner, below the worst of the coffee smudge, there was another crude drawing that, when Bates was able to zoom in on it, showed what appeared to be a Greyhound coach with a series of more or less straight lines coming up from it, heading toward the overcrowded sky.

“That’s got to be a bus,” Bates said, pointing to its boxy appearance and its three wheels per side. It also showed many windows and a big windshield, as well as a hole in its roof. No one could disagree with him. Though still childlike, this drawing was the most identifiable scribble on the napkin. Bates also showed him that there was some writing in the upper right-hand corner of the napkin, but that it was almost totally obscured by the massive coffee stain and the imprint of the two nickels.

Ryder just shook his head. “Well, it’s got to be a mass attack on a busy airport,” he said. “O’Hare or someplace. What else could it be?”

“But assuming this might be the second bus,” Bates said, “why stage a mass attack at one airport while your mook brothers are driving around the country setting up separate attacks on as many as nine different airports?”

He was right. It didn’t make sense—and it left them all scratching their heads. Everyone present was fairly sure that the drawing had something to do with the mysterious second bus.

But the images in the air remained very puzzling.

 

They drained the rest of the coffee and sat there in near silence, trying to comprehend all that Bates had uncovered.

Finally Hunn began to speak.

“We’ve got to start talking about this,” he said. “The more we avoid it, the more time we lose … .”

“So talk about it then,” Gallant told him testily.

“OK,” Hunn began again. “Look at all the shit this Rushton guy’s been doing. There’s no freaking way those missiles accidentally fell into the hands of the mooks. Rushton was behind it—all these files prove it. And that means he had to be paid off, somehow, someway. Or he’s got something else up his sleeve … .”

Hunn was a good soldier. Brave, loyal, and smart. But he also had anger issues. They all did. He had already done a number on many of the Al Qaeda operatives they’d been able to track down, a small hatchet being his weapon of choice. At this point, though, he was ready to invade France.

“And don’t forget,” he went on. “This asshole general went to great lengths to prevent us from stopping those missiles from getting into the U.S.—and he had us locked away indefinitely to boot. He’s not just some stupid ass trying to get out of his own way. He’s in thick with the French and the mooks, one way or another.”

Everyone nodded solemnly. They knew what was coming next.

“So, are we going to do what we said we were going to do when we got up here?” Hunn asked.

A long silence. The team had given up a long time ago on the niceties of conflict. Rules of war, Geneva Convention—all that crap. They moved in a new world, a place where things happened as fast as the bings and bangs of the Internet or the speed at which a picture could be flashed around the world. Close to the speed of light. Instantaneous. That’s what their world was—and that’s what they had to be, too. They didn’t have time for long-drawn-out investigations, or trying to explain themselves, or committees being formed, or going the standard route and allowing the FBI to fuck things up.

They had come up here for many reasons, but two of them stood out: The elimination of Palm Tree, ending his little dance once and for all. And now Rushton … .

“But we’ve got several problems going here,” Fox reminded them. “Sure, we’ve probably got the goods on Rushton. But all that means is that no one in the government is going to start looking for those buses anytime soon. And, even if we could, there’s no way we could show all this to someone higher up and convince him that it’s all true in time before those assholes out there start shooting down airliners. That shit might start happening less than a day from now.”

“It’s just like at Hormuz,” Gallant groaned; he’d been there, so he knew of what he spoke. “Once again, we’re the only ones who know what’s really going on. We’re the only ones that are in a position to stop it.”

They all hung their heads. They’d been expecting this—or something like it. But that didn’t make it any easier.

The buses were out there; they had missiles in them. And if the government wasn’t going to stop them, then it was up to the ghost team to. Again, they had planned for this eventuality. But it still took a while for it to finally sink in.

“But not only do we have to find the two buses,” Ozzi said, “and deal with Rushton. We have to figure out that other thing.”

Ryder looked at the rest of them. They were staring back at him with sunken, tired eyes. They all looked miserable—and, he supposed, so did he.

“What ‘other thing’?” he asked. “Are you telling me, there’s more?”

No one said a word. So Ryder just turned back to Bates, who nodded grimly.

“There is,” he finally revealed. “And this one is almost impossible to figure out, more so than the napkin.”

Once again, he started banging on his keyboard.

“I went as deep as I could go into Palm Tree’s memory banks,” he went on. “And just when I thought I was at the end, I got stopped at one last file Rushton sent him. It has the absolutely tightest security regime I’ve ever encountered surrounding it.”

Ryder saw the file icon pop up on Bates’s screen.

“This file was given even higher priority and therefore more protection than even his most obvious correspondence with Palm Tree,” Bates went on. “And notice how it’s marked: ‘For Immediate Action.’ Yet it’s labeled ‘May 1 through 7.’”

Sure enough, the icon’s label seemed to indicate something having to do with the first seven days in May.

Ryder shook his head wearily. “But it’s June,” he said.

Bates just shrugged. “I know,” he said. “Makes it even more screwy, doesn’t it?”

“Can’t you get anything out of them?” Ryder asked, looking at the frozen screen that represented the dead end Bates had run into.

“Very, very little,” he replied. “But the trace I was able to suck out looked like orders for troop movements, moving air assets around, things like that. But that’s all I can see right now.”

“What could he be hiding more than the fact that he’s working with the French and Al Qaeda to shoot down a bunch of planes in his own country?” Ryder asked incredulously.

It was a good question. But no one had a clue as to what the answer might be. Another long silence. The world was back on their shoulders.

“So, what are we going to do?” Hunn asked again. “The clock is ticking here, and suddenly it looks like there isn’t enough minutes in a day for us … .”

Fox finally spoke up: “I say we proceed like we were going to anyway. This added complication with Rushton isn’t that big of a surprise, though personally I never thought he’d go so far as to actively aid the mooks with that low-grade-threat order on ground transport.

“But we’ll just have to deal with it while we are on the move. Getting an ID on those buses, figuring out what’s on that napkin, and stopping the mooks from shooting down airplanes is what we have to fix first. If not, we let a lot of people down. The whole country, in fact. And a lot of people will die, too. So, let’s get our stuff together, and whoever is leaving, let’s get to it.”

More silence. They were all tired, hungry, and miserable. No one wanted to move.

Then Ozzi said to Fox, “But what about Li?”

Fox thought for a very long time. He looked over at Ryder, the senior man, who just shrugged.

Finally Fox said, “Bring her in here and let her read everything, including those first two e-mail files. We’re going to need her help more than we thought. And we can’t keep her in the dark, not if she’s going to put herself at risk.”

Then he looked back at the two files “Fast Ball” and “Slow Curve,” which Bates had brought back onto the screen.

“And tell her she can stop looking for Bobby Murphy, too,” Fox added. “Because I think we just found him.”