None of the horses wore halters. This, along with their crazed attitudes from the explosion, made them almost impossible to capture. Each horse had a gaggle of at least five students chasing vainly after it, ropes or feed buckets in their hands, like a pack of inefficient dogs. But, as Farooq peered over the rim of his tinted limousine window, he saw one man trotting easily beside a muscular blood bay. Both hands holding the horse’s flowing mane in a firm grip, the man moved in a loping cadence alongside the prancing animal. In four quick strides, the bay surged from a trot to a canter, stretching out its neck as it changed gait and effectively yanked the man up and onto its back in one beautiful, fluid movement. In a fleeting instant, horse and rider disappeared into a swirling cloud of dust and blowing debris.
If ever there existed a man who could come as a thief into the Kingdom and produce such an explosion right under their very noses… the man on the blood bay horse would be him.
“My sheikh?” Zafir’s frantic voice snapped Farooq back to his cell phone. “Are you there? I hear screaming. What has happened?”
“We have copies of the video records from the laboratory on our remote server?” Farooq’s voice grew quiet as he struggled to control his breathing.
“Of course,” Zafir said.
“Very well. I will review them.”
“I will come at once.”
“You have another mission.” Farooq sighed. “Our timeline is already set in motion. I will have Raheem retrieve them. I fear our medical project is no more…”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“No more?”
Farooq ground his teeth. His nostrils flared. “I must know who did this to me,” he spat. “I will deal with him in my own way.” He rolled up the window and rested his head against the cool leather seat, suddenly exhausted. “In any case, your duty is before you, my friend. Your time is far spent. The others should have already moved. In the end, our saboteur has done nothing but take a few pawns. The American devils do not realize it, but with our opening moves, the game is already won.”
Jericho guided the big bay with his knees, pointing it toward a throng of white-robed students who milled under rows of palm trees and the buzzing glow of streetlights. Stars peeked intermittently from a brilliant indigo sky through clouds of smoke and falling ash. The horse, a strong-willed gelding, was a flighty one. Jericho had passed on the chance to make his escape on a Palomino mare that had looked much gentler. His ex-wife was a blonde so he’d decided to take his chances on the brunette.
He glanced at the TAG Aquaracer on his wrist as he slid from the prancing animal. He took a loose lead rope from a waiting student and slid it over the sweating horse’s arched neck, looping it around the animal’s nose to form a makeshift figure-eight halter. He handed the end to the astonished student with a smile and slight bow. The train to Riyadh left in two hours.
He still had time for a shower.
CHAPTER 32
Mahoney rolled an empty glass vial back and forth in her open hand, holding it up to study in the soft glow of Win Palmer’s green desk lamp. They knew so much about these terrorists… and still, they knew so little.
The Director sat behind his desk, thinking deeply. Beyond him, slouched on an overstuffed couch along the far wall, Quinn nursed a can of Diet Coke. Thibodaux sat across from him, looking at a loose stack of photographs from Farooq’s lab.
“We need to tell Sergeant Meeks’s family something,” the big Cajun said, “even if it’s a lie. Let them know their boy’s not lost out there… missing forever.”
“In time,” Win Palmer agreed. “When this is over. Right now, what we have to worry about more than anything is panic — and I’m not speaking only of the population. You’d be surprised at how often I hear the term ‘absolute containment’ used from the Gang of Five in our little briefings.”
Megan scoffed. “That’s what they called the solution to their problem with Northwest 2—‘absolute containment.’”
Palmer gave a somber nod. “What happened there is not something anyone is proud of, Ms. Mahoney. But most believe it was a necessary evil.”
“How much about this does your Gang of Senators know?” Thibodaux asked.
“They don’t know everything,” Palmer said. “But they do know about the virus. Two very influential generals have spent a considerable amount of time bending their ears with an endless list of the deadly possibilities. Carpet bombing the hell out of any area that the virus shows up in has been discussed as a more than viable option — even here in the U.S. I don’t mind telling you, these people are scared out of their wits.”
Quinn leaned back, swallowed up in the burgundy cushions of Win Palmer’s couch. “Then we have to stop these guys first.” Tendons in his arms bunched as he sipped on his can of Diet Coke. He was still rumpled from traveling through a dozen different time zones in three days and though he’d recently shaved, already sported a healthy five o’clock shadow. He looked up at Mahoney from the glossy color copies of the martyr photographs he’d brought back with him from Al-Hofuf.
“What do you think, doctor? Could they transport enough virus in that vial to hurt us?”
“More than enough,” she said. A shiver crawled up her back and left both arms tingling. She held the vial-within-a-vial up to her eye, between her thumb and forefinger. “This holds about ten cc’s — a scant two teaspoons. Considering the fact that the sprayed droplets of a single sneeze appear to be enough to pass the virus, I’d say they could put enough liquid in here to kill half the Eastern seaboard before we could contain it… if we could contain it…” Her voice trailed off.
Thibodaux chimed in.
“Stuff this deadly,” he mused, rubbing his thick jawbone. “They’d want to be careful not to let it out of the bag in their own sandbox. It’s one thing to infect your enemy, but if it’s as deadly as you say it is, this could wipe out the entire Middle East without too much of a problem. Those guys always looked a little on the sickly side to me anyhow.” He pointed to the photographs. “The ones transporting the virus might end up as martyrs, but I’d lay odds the higher-ups in their chain of command have other plans besides killing off half of Islam.”
Jericho tossed his empty Coke can in a wastebasket beside the sofa. He looked up at Palmer, who sat behind a mahogany desk, freckled fingers steepled in front of his ruddy face, elbows on a leather desk blotter, listening.
The Director of National Intelligence leaned back in his chair, as if to study the nine-foot ceiling as he spoke. “Exceptional work, Jericho — bringing these photographs back. We’ve uploaded them into Immigration and Customs Enforcement, TSA, the Bureau, and every other facial-recognition database we have. Hopefully, ICE or State will nail these bastards as they’re coming in. Biometric programs aren’t foolproof, but if one of them uses an ATM or smiles at the right camera, we should be able to get a preliminary location.”
“Still just the two names?” Thibodaux asked, dwarfing an office chair across from Jericho. He hadn’t been traveling, but it was clear from the dark circles under his eyes that he hadn’t slept much either.
“Just the two younger ones,” Palmer said. “Both are under thirty and appear to come from poor Bedouin families. Hamid is the jowly one. The one with the mole beside his nose is Kalil.” The DNI shrugged. “We’re running the unsub through Interpol and State. Defense found a picture that’s a possible match, but they can’t seem to locate the damned file with a name.”