Smith frowned perceptibly. He agreed that any day aboveground was a good day, but it had been a reckless decision on Castilla’s part. The consequences of guessing wrong would have been almost too devastating to imagine.
But it appeared that the president hadn’t guessed wrong. The last contact with a parasite victim had been forty-eight hours ago when an infected man charged a Belgian special forces team clearing a cave system to the north. Fortunately, he’d had a broken femur and the injury slowed him down enough to allow the soldiers to take him out before he got within fifty feet.
“I suppose you think I should thank the American people for not irradiating a third of my country,” Farrokh said.
“Don’t be too hard on Jon,” Sarie replied. “If I’d been the one on the phone to the Americans, I might have told them the same thing.”
The Iranian continued to look down at the coalition forces occupying his land. “And what is he telling them now? Why is it that we haven’t received even the level of assistance given to the Libyans?”
Smith considered lying but knew that Farrokh would see right through it.
The video his people had posted to the Internet hadn’t just shocked the outside world; it had created a massive backlash in Iran — allowing the formation of an unlikely alliance among secular liberals, moderates, and even conservative followers of a few imams who had pronounced bioweapons un-Islamic. The size and dynamism of the demonstrations erupting across Iran were so far beyond what had come before, the government was forced to immediately enlist the military in a last-ditch effort to cling to power.
“It was a complicated situation, Farrokh. We—”
“Can I assume those complications are the reason that over three thousand of my people have died at the hands of the Iranian army in the last forty-eight hours?”
Smith sighed quietly. “Nobody wanted this. But you have to understand what we’re dealing with here: more foreign militaries and UN forces than even I can keep track of, press, international observers, and organizations like WHO and the CDC. Khamenei has access to modern missiles, and if even one or two made it through our defenses, the whole operation might have fallen apart. Then you could have seen this infection in Riyadh, or Cairo, or Damascus. There was no way we could take that chance.”
“So you made a bargain with the devil.”
“We told Khamenei that if he left us alone, we’d do the same. But we also made it clear that if so much as a firecracker goes off within a hundred miles of one of our people, we’ll take out his entire military and impose a no-fly zone until we get color eight-by-tens of him dangling from a rope.”
“So we’re on our own,” Farrokh said.
“You never miss an opportunity to tell me that you want the West to stay out of your business. Well, we have a saying in America: Be careful what you wish for.”
“And the parasite?”
“Not my sphere of influence anymore,” Smith said. “President Castilla’s put a certain South African you know in charge of that part of the operation.”
Farrokh twisted around and looked up at Sarie. “Is this true?”
“One hundred percent,” she said, jabbing Smith in the shoulder. “From now on, the colonel here will be calling me ma’am.”
Smith grinned and considered a salute, but he wasn’t sure he could lift his arm that far.
“Have you been able to cure the people who have contracted it?” Farrokh asked.
She shook her head sadly. “Most of the victims we’ve tried to treat were already fully symptomatic. At that point, the brain damage is irreversible and there isn’t really anything we can do for them. I think that if we can catch the infection within an hour or so of transmission, a cocktail of existing antiparasitics might work. But so far we haven’t been able to find the right combination.”
“It’s still spreading, then?”
“I’m cautiously optimistic that it’s not,” Sarie said. “We don’t understand exactly how the parasite affects different animals, though, so we’re still running tests. The good news is that it’s too arid out here to have much wildlife, and the livestock is fairly easy to keep track of. I think we’re going to be okay.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
She put a hand on the Iranian’s shoulder. “Maybe you should try focusing on the bright side for a change. At least you’re not an ashy outline on some wall.”
Author’s Note
It all started for me when I was one year old.
My father came in and announced that he’d quit his job and joined the FBI — something my mother didn’t even know he was interested in. We were shipped off to her parents while he trained in Quantico and then quickly found ourselves in Salt Lake City, one of our many homes over the years.
As it turns out, this wasn’t as impulsive as it first seemed. My father grew up in a small cotton-farming town in southeast Missouri, and on a visit to his family when I was a teenager, my grandmother told me the story of his first encounter with the Bureau. It was 1953 and there had been a bank robbery in the area, prompting an FBI agent to interview the owner of the local general store. My father, then twelve years old, wandered in for supplies and hid behind a shelf to listen. When he got home, he told his mother about the experience — that the man had been “dressed real fine and talked real good.” And that one day he, too, would be a G-man. She just smiled.
Growing up in a Bureau family is about as interesting as it gets, but also a bit challenging. Of course, there are the constant moves that can be tough on a kid trying to fit in. Even stranger, though, is the sense of secrecy. It may be that my early training as a novelist came from filling in imaginary details to circumspect conversations I overheard. The need-to-know attitude is oddly pervasive, as anyone who has watched my father and me move a ladder will attest. It’s always teetering upright with him yelling “Left! Right! Not that far right, for Christ’s sake!” Now that he’s retired, I aspire to get him to just tell me the ladder’s final destination before we pick it up. I’m not hopeful, though.
Whatever the negatives, it was all worth it. How many kids get to have dinner with a man who, by law, cannot be photographed? Or drink a beer with the SAS? Or discuss Northern Ireland with the head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary? And then there was the time I came home from my summer job and was told that we were having dinner with an insurance salesman who needed help with the FBI-related sections of his third novel. He was nice enough to bring us a copy of his first effort. It had been published by the Naval Institute Press under the title The Hunt for Red October.
And how many people get to read about their college graduation dinner in history books? It was 1988 and my family was at a restaurant in London where my father was the legal attaché. About halfway through the hors d’oeuvres, someone from the embassy came in and told us that a Pan Am flight had gone down in a little town called Lockerbie. That was the last I saw of my father for months.
With all this cloak and dagger, it was hard not to be a huge fan of thriller novels. The first I can remember reading was Shogun, still vivid in my mind because I was supposed to do my seventh-grade book report on it and was a little shocked to find out there was a second volume. I wasn’t only a fan, though, I was also a critic. Authors who made factual errors or failed to faithfully capture the operatives they wrote about drove me crazy. And that led me to focus on the masters of the genre — people like Jack Higgins, John le Carré, and Robert Ludlum.
So it’s a great honor for my eleventh novel to be part of the Covert-One series. Hopefully, you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.