Dale slumped in the back corner of the dusty little café. He’d indulged in a thick Turkish breakfast of eggs, tomatoes, spicy sausage, and pita. It was a departure from his steady traveling diet of protein bars and water. But he’d been starving.
He’d walked, or more accurately limped, for the past few hours. After jumping from the train’s last car and smacking his knees against the embankment, he’d had to walk a half mile back before finding his backpack. With that lifeline recovered, he’d retreated into some low hills, putting a few miles between himself and the tracks. Heading generally south, he’d navigated toward the lights of a small town, then napped in the hollow of a windbreak with a good tactical egress route. Before the sun came up, he’d entered town. At the back of a gas station with no surveillance cameras, he’d found a hose and taken a very long drink, washed himself up.
He’d changed his clothes and tied his hair back in a short ponytail. His ball cap was long gone, but that was just as well. He’d considered altering his face by shaving his beard, since his legend was now blown. But he wanted to fit in with the locals, who tended toward facial hair. Though a little old for it, Dale now opted for the drifter-backpacker look.
He’d been dragging out his time in the café. It was the kind of roadhouse that might see twenty customers across two meal services, getting by on revenues of perhaps a hundred bucks a day. There’d been only a few patrons this morning. A single hustling kid shifted between grill, tables, and cash register.
Dale had been delighted to find it, a sleepy little hole in the wall where he might recover some energy.
A potential interloper had come in about a half hour back. At first Dale thought he was going to be trouble; then he’d reconsidered.
The new kid had short hair and a goatee. He was about twenty-five and had that nervous, twitching quality of someone up to no good. When he’d come in, the boy who ran the place had simply nodded from across the grill. Goatee had taken a look around, noted Dale, and parked himself at a table like it was his office. He’d been there ever since, drinking Turkish coffee from a tiny cup, answering his frequently ringing phone in a voice too low to be heard.
The bell on the door rang and another young Iranian walked in. He was dressed like a construction worker: beefy boots, orange sweatshirt. He and Goatee went out in the parking lot, out of sight. Dale heard the muffled sound of a car door, maybe a trunk. Then the bell dinged again as Goatee came back. He had another call three minutes later.
Dale had a theory: Goatee was a drug dealer and he was allowed to work his table in the open for a cut to Grill Boy. His supply probably came from across the border in Turkey, making the café a uniquely valuable location. God knew the restaurant needed the money. The food was only so-so.
The kid in charge came to clear the table. Dale ordered coffee to drag his stay out a little longer. He could also use the caffeine.
Google Maps said he needed to cover more than three hundred miles to get down to Alut. He had three days to get there. It wasn’t going to happen on foot. He wondered if Goatee might be up for a quick buck.
With the Glock in the small of his back, Dale approached his table. The proprietor was washing dishes now. It was just the two of them during a momentary pause between cell calls.
“I need a ride,” Dale said after a polite greeting in his accented Farsi.
Like the entrepreneur that he was, Goatee appraised Dale. His eye lingered on the CIA man’s face, probably noting the scratches that ran from below his left eye to the top of his beard.
“I’m not Uber,” the kid said. “We don’t have that around here.”
His phone rang again. The kid looked at it, pressed a button to silence it, set it down.
Okay, Dale thought. He’s at least up for a negotiation.
“Precisely why I need a ride,” Dale replied.
“Where you from, old-timer?”
Old-timer? “Canada. Just doing some trekking. I need to meet some friends down south. I’ve got money.”
The magic words. The kid leaned back. They talked about a price. Dale started low; the kid jacked him high. When it got high enough, the kid asked Dale to prove he’d be able to pay. Dale held up a fistful of rials. Goatee nodded, disappeared behind the counter. Dale could hear him talking things over with the cook in the kitchen, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Goatee came back and said no. He needed more money. He said there were a lot of police about. Not that they were doing anything illegal, but there might be roadblocks. NAJA did that sometimes. To get around them would cost extra. Dale promised more and threw in the sweetener of a 50 percent down payment.
A few minutes later, he was in the front passenger seat of an ’89 Peugeot bouncing over a gravel road. The low growl of the tires, the hazy gray daylight, and the long sleepless night put him in a lull. He knew he couldn’t afford that.
He reached into a pocket and found a tin of Altoids. Buried inside, he located one of his pills, an amphetamine. He threw it in his mouth with some mints, slugging it down with the bottle of water he’d bought at the diner. A few minutes later, he was wide-awake with fresh breath. He kept one eye on the kid, one eye on the road.
Goatee shifted his glance sideways. He smiled at Dale.
Whether from jet lag, the extra gravity of bad news, or low blood sugar, Meredith was beginning to slump in her seat. More than anything, she wanted to cast aside all vanity, bend forward, and lay her head down like a preschooler at nap time. But her team was giving her the latest on Iran.
Having yet to check in to her hotel, she was still in yoga pants, running shoes, and a linen shirt. They were in the featureless Formica conference room on the third floor of a featureless Dubai office building. The sign on the locked door at the foyer declared it as suite 301, Fuse International Partners, a consulting company with a wholly fictitious set of books submitted to the IRS every year for good measure. The firm’s managing director, Maggie O’Dea, was in town. Business was not good; Maggie was not happy.
The Iranians were continuing to ramp up their military posture. Planes had been fueled on tarmacs. Naval ship boilers had been fired. Troop leaves had been canceled. The intelligence signs were plain. Yet they were also lacking, since no one knew the status of the nascent Iranian nuclear capability.
The man who could provide some answers was supposed to be on his way in. The DEVGRU commandos who were to help the exfil were in place up in eastern Iraq at FOB Hammer. They’d taken one practice run toward the border, just to check the timing and the terrain. They had a Reaper drone quietly surveying the landscape from the Iraqi side, bulking up useful intel.
But CENTCOM was getting cold feet. Meredith had had to get on the phone to soothe some colonel up there in charge of operations. That was bad enough. It got much worse when Rance called.
She’d been tempted to send him to voice mail. But she knew it would only make things worse. She steeled herself and stepped into the hall. No need for the team to witness this. She tightened her abs, waiting for the gut punch.
Rance’s salvo was both intense and voluminous. Just what in the fuck was she doing in Dubai when she was supposed to meet him there at the W in Doha? Where the hell were her husband and Cerberus? Why didn’t Rance have the details of the meet yet? Didn’t she know that CENTCOM himself had escalated to Dorsey? Just WTF kind of op was this?
Meredith absorbed the words like arrows, wincing now and then at some of the harsher language. But callused by years of practice, she was armored up for this kind of thing. Profanity? Check. Indignation? Roger. Condescension? In spades. The one-way conversation had so far met all of her expectations of the Significant Male Tantrum.
After Hurricane Rance had blown itself out, she stayed quiet for five long seconds, nothing but a hiss on the line between them. She clenched her toes, enduring the calculated silence.
“Well?” Rance finally shouted at her. That was her cue—the invitation to speak.
“Ed, you’re right,” she began. “My behavior has been inexcusable.” Step one in the playbook: ensure the male felt vindicated. “I should have been able to handle all of this without any of your involvement.” On to step two: stroking the aggrieved ego. “I really look up to you and it feels terrible to have let you down.” Finally, the crucial third step: feigned sacrifice. “If you were to ask me to resign right now, I’d fully understand. Really.”
They both knew that wasn’t going to happen. Like it or not, Meredith was the one and only link to John, who was the one and only link to Cerberus. Cerberus was perhaps the only person in the world who could help them with the Iranian conundrum.
She heard Rance sigh, two hundred miles away.
“All right,” he said. Another breath. “Let’s not overreact. No need to get crazy. I guess I’m here anyway. So what now?”
This would be tricky. She needed things to sound positive, while still keeping him at arm’s length. She still wasn’t willing to risk details that might be compromised. Not when they were this close to the end. She briefed him on what CENTCOM had done so far, the practice sortie, the Reaper drone.
She added, “Tomorrow night’s the first night that Cerberus should be at Alut. He’ll ping us as soon as he’s on-site. Just as soon as my DOD orders clear, I’m headed up to Hammer, and I will personally brief the DEVGRU team.”
“All right,” Rance said. “But I want you up at Hammer tonight. Just in case your husband is early.”
“I don’t have orders from DOD yet.”
“Fuck that. I’ll get them,” he said, boasting. “Expect a bird to pick you up in the next couple of hours.”
Though Rance thought he had that kind of juice, she doubted it. DOD was impenetrable. Then again, Rance could be surprisingly effective when he wanted to be.
Hours later, after the sun had set, when she’d begun to think her flight to Hammer might not materialize until morning, she trudged to her hotel. She bade her team goodbye and caught a cab to the Marriott.
She couldn’t stop thinking about John. In one sense she expected his bias toward silence. On the other, she thought something was off. To calm herself, she called Grace from the back of her cab. But it was the middle of the day back in Annapolis. Grace was off doing naval things.
The lobby was busy. It seemed to take forever to check in. But finally, she had her room and the key card to a very high floor, thirty-some stories up. It was a long walk through the lobby to the express elevators. Meredith wished it weren’t. She felt weak.
Just as the elevator doors were closing, an Emirates Air flight attendant thrust out a hand to make them reopen. She got in the car next to Meredith, muttering a thank-you with a vaguely English accent. She stood on the other side of an overweight Arab businessman.
For less than a second, Meredith wondered why the default thank-you had been in English. She let it go. Everyone spoke English. The Arab got off at the first express stop, the twentieth floor. It was just the two women now.
Meredith had admired the uniform of the flight attendants during the flight over from the other side of the world—desert tan fitted skirt and jacket, charming red hat with dark veil. As the elevator resumed its climb skyward, the flight attendant fiddled with a makeup kit.
For God’s sake, why? Meredith wondered, looking at the flight attendant from the reflection of the number pad. The woman was beautiful, as were most of the handpicked flight attendants of the chauvinistic Middle Eastern airlines. Beautiful. An eleven.
Meredith became suddenly uncomfortable. She reached forward to hit the number of a different floor. She thought through the location of the Glock she’d picked up at the office. It was in her handbag. She moved her fingers toward the clasp.
The blonde suddenly spun toward her. There was something in her hand. It looked like a pen. While Meredith reached for her gun, the blonde jabbed her in the jaw, snapping back her chin. Before she knew what was happening, Meredith felt a terrible sting in her neck.
The CIA officer raised an arm in a defensive maneuver and tried to kick the woman in the knees. But her limbs felt suddenly weighted. While her mind churned through five things she should have been doing to neutralize the threat, her body wouldn’t listen. Powerless, she sank to a crouch on the elevator floor while the blonde zip-tied her wrists.