All of this…and they had failed.
Over three hundred of their fellow Americans dead…two hundred and thirty-three of them aboard the doomed Delta flight. Souls flying into the night. To their deaths.
Perhaps he had failed.
All of this — and they had managed to completely lose the man responsible for all of it. The man whose praises the keyboard jihadis had been singing for the last six days.
The shaikh.
“Tarik Abdul Muhammad…how did we let him get clear?” Carter asked quietly, glancing away from the screens and back to Lasker.
“Based on what intel we have, I’d say that no one was looking for someone in a police uni.” Lasker’s face darkened. “We still haven’t even confirmed that he was actually the shooter. No prints beyond Sergeant Zimmerman’s on the gun. Nothing on surveillance.”
“How does that happen?” Carter ran a hand through his hair, quietly cursing. Helpless.
It was a sick feeling, coming from deep within. Reminding him of the night Caruso had died in his apartment, bullets churning the air. “Forget Ocean’s Eleven — these resorts have the best video surveillance in the world. How does a man get in…and out, without his face ever appearing on tape?”
“Yet another question we don’t have an answer to.”
Wrong answer.
Hands trembling with anger, Carter stalked out into the open area of op-center, in front of the big screens — his sudden movement drawing the attention of the rest of his analysts. His team.
“Listen to me,” he began, tears streaming down his cheeks as he turned back to face them. “I don’t want to hear any more excuses — any more of what we don’t know. We are going to find the…people who did this to our country. And we are going to see them burn.”
Returning home after a mission was always difficult. The innocent cheer in the eyes of those you met on the street, the realization that everyone had gone about their lives without you.
Unmissed. And unmourned.
This time was different, Thomas thought, closing the door of his apartment behind him. He slid the deadbolt into place, placing the case of vodka in his hand on the kitchen counter as he shrugged off his coat.
This time the people were different, haunted even — by their awakening to reality. The malls were deserted, signs for post-Christmas sales hanging forlorn in the windows.
Because they had failed. The night had come to their shores, and they had failed to stop it.
With Congresswoman Gilpin still in the ICU, clinging to life, it was hard to say exactly what they had accomplished.
He unsealed the first of the small bottles of vodka, feeling the fiery liquid sear his throat. It was cheap stuff, not much better than lighter fluid — but it was good enough for its purpose.
To make him forget.
That’s all he wanted — really all he had wanted since Jerusalem. When all of the betrayals had begun.
One bottle down. Eleven to go before morning. Or before he passed out — whichever came first.
He sat down on the couch, his tired muscles settling against the smooth leather as he reached for the TV remote.
“…of the intelligence community in the wake of the Christmas Eve attacks. Senator, you are on the record stating that these attacks could have easily been prevented. What do you believe should have been done differently?”
Easily prevented. The camera panned to the pasty-white face of a politician, eyes full of righteous indignation. Eyes that had never seen the darkness — never looked into the face of the enemy.
He began talking, but Thomas couldn’t focus on his words, sipping slowly on the second bottle of vodka. Watching as the screen changed, to cell-phone video of Delta Flight 94 going down…exploding in the skies over Las Vegas. The same images, over and over again. Over and over.
He buried his face in his hands, feeling suddenly nauseous — struggling to clear the image from his mind. The people you couldn’t save…
Thomas walked into the bedroom, into the adjacent bath, turning the faucet on hot. Bloodshot eyes stared back at him in the mirror as he ran his hands through the stream, as if striving to scrub them clean.
His cellphone was on the dresser in the bedroom as he walked back out. His personal cellphone, the one he always left behind when he went into the field.
“Your voicemail has two new messages,” a computerized voice informed him as he walked back into the main room of the apartment, glancing at the now-darkened TV.
The first one was a woman’s voice, rather loud, shrill even — the woman who’d spent the night with him just hours before all of this had begun.
Before David Lay had been the target of assassins. Before Nichols had disappeared.
Michelle? Marisa? Monica? Her name had started with an “M,” that much he could recall, and nothing more. He tilted the bottle of vodka back as he hit the button to erase her message. Not worth remembering.
“Thomas, you don’t know me — but our friend Harry gave me your number.”
Harry. He hadn’t said a word on the military flight back to the East Coast, eyes empty of emotion, staring down at his hands. The Air Force C-130 had run into turbulence and Nichols hadn’t even flinched.
As if he simply didn’t care.
“You can call me Walter…I’m his pastor. You probably don’t want to hear what I have to say, but I was where you are once. And it cost me everything I valued in life. I think I can help you — or more importantly, that I know the One who can.”
There was an earnestness in the pastor’s voice…a strangely compelling honesty.
Thomas glanced from the phone to the bottle of vodka in his hand. As nearly empty as the void within him.
His finger slid clumsily across the touchscreen, selecting the “Call Back” button. And he listened as it began to ring…
“Pull!”
An orange disc flew from the low house with a whirring sound, cutting through the clear, cold morning air.
Senator Roy Coftey snapped the Krieghoff K-80 over-and-under to his shoulder, leading the clay as it spun through the air.
The thunder of a shotgun blast rent the dawn air, the clay disintegrating into a thousand pieces as the shot hit it square.
“I see you’re still smokin’ them, Roy.”
Coftey lowered his shotgun, popping the empty shells out of the breech as he turned to face the newcomer.
“As ever, Ian — can’t lose my touch. I’m assuming that you got my message?”
The President’s chief of staff nodded, rubbing his gloved hands together. “Pretty cryptic, if you ask me. You’ve been hanging out with the spooks for way too long, Roy. Starting to act like them.”
“I do what’s necessary,” the senator replied coolly, slipping another pair of 12-gauge shells into the Krieghoff before pulling the break-action closed. He ran a finger along the engraved receiver — silver with accents of gold, the scene a covey of pheasants rising from the brush. “You’ve always known that.”
Cahill nodded, eyeing him carefully. “Yes, you have. And it’s that character trait that has rendered you invaluable to your President — to your party. What’s this all about?”
President. Party. Coftey glanced up the rising ground toward the helipad, Marine One glistening there in the early morning sun.
What were any of those worth…really? A man’s soul?