Maggie’s occasional trips to Kuwait were off-limits, even to Pat. And he knew it.
Maggie had put up with her office roommate for more than three months now. In the first week she’d quickly learned that Pat was a true buttoned-down type, a man who wore medium starch in his blue-striped shirts even on a sweltering 103-degree Qatarian day. As the United States embassy’s regional security officer, Pat considered the unrest in the Gulf an “opportunity.” It certainly was the place to be for an advancing member of the diplomatic corps.
He’ll probably do a few tours and then go to work for Exxon.
Maggie had also learned that Pat had a weekly habit of removing everything from his desk and polishing it with a bottle of furniture wax he kept in a lower drawer. The pencils were all lined up in a row, always on the left. Only number twos. A white writing pad on the right. She accused him of being a Prussian, everything kept strictly in order.
And that’s not bad, she thought, if that is what he really wants.
As for Margaret Elizabeth O’Donald, since her days at Stanford she had been the polar opposite of Pat Stuart, always the one with her desk piled too high. Copies of Jane’s on weapons and shipping were shuffled with satellite imagery and intelligence memos across her desk. Jane’s was a spy’s bible. The encyclopedia of weapons and war machines contained the specifics on every killing machine ever made. And Maggie took great pride in knowing exactly where each copy lay, along with the scattered photos and documents. She also knew the mess drove Stuart crazy.
Maggie’s desk had one other unique feature. In the corner stood a very small photo frame with no photo in it. The bright gold frame, no bigger than a passport, surrounded only a blank, white mat background. Odd as it might look to a visitor, Maggie knew which photograph belonged there — a picture of her lover and herself on an ivy-covered path leading into Battery Kemble Park in northwest D.C. It had become their traditional meeting place. They had put both of their careers at risk simply by having the photo taken. Maggie could never let Pat or any of her other colleagues see it. Instead, Pat, along with each and every visitor, was left to view the empty picture frame… and wonder.
Pat’s wife had come the closest to divining its meaning. In fact, Maggie had overheard her describe Maggie as a “distraction” for her husband when Maggie first arrived in Qatar. Pat’s wife never spoke to Maggie directly and, for her first week on the job, she hadn’t spoken to her husband much either. Pat had attributed his wife’s behavior to her pregnancy and the accompanying mood swings she seemed to have. That was not true. Maggie knew that it scared her to death that her husband spent days in the close quarters of a small office with a young, attractive woman.
Since childhood, Maggie had been slender and olive-skinned. When she visited her grandfather’s cattle farm, they had called her an abolengo, after the land-rich elite descended from the first Spanish to arrive in Colombia. All this, along with her deep green eyes, she had gotten from her mother.
From her father, a lifelong career diplomat, Maggie had inherited only his strong-willed stubbornness and Irish name. O’Donald was not her true birth name. Her birth certificate said Mary Louise O’Neil. Like O’Donald, it was Irish, but like all at the Agency she had an acquired name, and the name she was known as was Margaret O’Donald. She had used O’Donald so long that sometimes she had forgotten that it was not her name at birth. Since the death of her parents, she seldom visited the thought of her birth name. She didn’t forget, however, her father’s Irish will. She was known to be intractable, but despite her stubbornness, she had inherited a very bright mind. And hopefully, she thought, the judgment needed to handle this e-mail from Riyadh.
I can’t forward this just yet.
It would eventually be classified as “top secret: for the eyes of only those who needed to know.” She felt the thumping beat of her heart. The chess game had risen to a new level.
Lately, she’d come to suspect that she was being fed information for some purpose beyond what she could immediately see. Over the course of only six months in the field, three of them in the Gulf, she had developed a top-level source in the House of Saud. It all seemed too easy, especially now.
The light in the room began to change yet again. Maggie looked up to see Pat’s face darkening in the gloom. A wall of opaque light approached the urban sprawl of Doha, its movement visible now. Sandstorms came that quickly in Qatar.
“It’s gonna shut this little city down,” Pat sighed from the window. “Hey, I’ve got something to show you.”
Maggie looked up from her desk.
“You remember the reception at the Radisson.”
She nodded. “The one for the alumni of Michigan.”
“Right.” He walked over to her desk with his cell phone. “I took a photo of the Michigan people as they left. I caught this in the background.”
A group of people dressed in tuxes and evening gowns were crowded together next to a Mercedes limo.
She looked. “So?”
“Look in the background.”
A tall figure was standing next to a small white car.
“And?”
“Something about him struck me.”
“Like what?”
“Like he was looking at me.” He paused. “Or you.”
“You know the drill.”
He was the security officer for the station.
“I’m going to send it in and let them run it.” Pat walked back to the window, his mind back on the approaching dust storm. It was getting darker.
Still undecided about the e-mail, Maggie rose and crossed the small room. She would say nothing of the e-mail, nor would she forward it to Langley. Not yet. If it turned out to be false, her next assignment might be Guam.
She took a peek through the office’s other window. The thick, green-tinted, bulletproof Plexiglas offered only a limited view of the embassy’s courtyard and, beyond, the soccer field. The field, she’d learned, had been intended not so much for sport as for its alternate role if the need arose — a helicopter landing zone.
“Is your car in the garage?” Pat asked.
“Oh, yeah.” She wouldn’t make that mistake again. “After last time—”
A flash of brilliant light came through both windows, and an explosion followed that rocked the building like a sonic boom. It sounded more like a deafening thud than a crack, as if the winds had muffled the sound in some strange way. Book, magazines, and files tumbled to the floor as the bomb’s concussion wave passed through the building.
Pat lurched back to the window. “What the hell was that?”
Maggie ran over to the window on his side of the embassy and peered over his shoulder. The sandstorm continued to rage outside.
“They must have used the storm to camouflage the attack,” she said as alarms began to sound throughout the building. The red light from the staircase just outside the door began to flash continuously.
“God, it may not be over.”
“You get the door,” Maggie barked to Pat, who strode across the room and swung the vault door closed. It could be closed and locked from both sides. Pat turned the wheel, spinning the locks.
Maggie ran to her desk. In an instant she inserted a USB flash drive, which asked for a password. She typed in the only one that she knew he would think of. Then she hit the Delete System button on her computer. As if a flashbulb exploded, the screen on her computer went blank. Next, she pulled away the backing of her empty picture frame and slid the small flash drive inside. Putting the mat and backing back in place, she took the .40-caliber Glock from her drawer and joined Pat back at his window. He glanced at her, then the gun.