He slid back the shower curtain and quickly dove into the bathtub. It was the only place to hide. He quieted his breathing, hoping against hope that maybe they’d overlook him.
But no. The light came on in the bathroom. The shower curtain was being peeled back. McRae closed his eyes, almost like a child who thought that if he couldn’t see the bad guys, the bad guys couldn’t see him.
“There you are.”
It was Alpha. McRae opened his eyes. The Viking-like man loomed large over him.
“Let’s go, Dr. McRae. You’ve been a bad boy and there will be a punishment.”
Alpha slapped one enormous hand on McRae’s back, bunched up a huge handful of pajama, and used it as a handle to lift McRae out of the tub. McRae allowed himself to be shoved/led back to his quarters. For as devastated as he was that his brief escape had come to an end, for as much as he feared whatever reprisal he was about to face, it had been worth it.
For one thing, he didn’t see any hiding places for cameras on his way out of the bedroom. So his captors didn’t know about the phone call he had made.
For another, he now knew Alida would be safe.
He was just glad he had gotten to hear her sweet voice one last time.
CHAPTER 29
CAIRO, Egypt
he 6 October Bridge had been called “the spinal cord of Cairo,” snaking as it did from the west bank of the Nile, through Gezira Island, over the river itself, and then on to the airport.
Its main span was 423 feet long, and Derrick Storm waited until he was nearly in the middle to slowly apply his breaks and bring the cargo truck to a stop, ignoring the angry beeps from the driver behind him.
This was the spot he had been looking for. The river was deep. The current was swift.
Just right.
He had sped through the night to get here. Having departed shortly before an ambulance arrived to care for Ahmed — and untied the guard in the shack on his way out — he had taken the cargo truck and the promethium, which he and Ahmed agreed was the best course of action. Well, it was more Storm’s idea than Ahmed’s. But Ahmed wasn’t exactly in a position to argue. Nor did he quibble when Storm asked him to have someone return his rental car. Men on the brink of bleeding to death tended to be quite suggestible.
The long drive north had given Storm time to work out a lot of things relating to Ingrid Karlsson, allowing him to untangle the twisted mix of ideology and ambition that fueled her madness. She was a woman who shunned the beliefs that fueled much of humanity’s violence toward itself. She was the citizen of the world, the one who rejected the concept of national boundaries or government intervention in markets or any of the people who would impose their way on others.
But that was, of course, its own kind of rigid doctrine. It turned out she was just as aggressive about promoting it as the religious zealots or the jingoistic nationalists. And in the promethium laser beam, she had found a weapon that helped her enforce her agenda.
He had been foolish in trusting her. The only person who had told him that Ahmed Trades Metal had any connection to the Medina Society was Ingrid. Ordinarily, he was scrupulous about being more suspicious toward information that came from only one source. And yet because Eusebio Rivera told him about seeing Ahmed Trades Metal on the promethium shipment going through the Panama Canal, it had felt to Storm like he had a second source.
And, of course, he had never checked it against existing CIA intelligence because, one, the CIA didn’t have much intelligence on the Medina Society; and, two, he had been forced to play it so close to the vest with Jones.
So that was his main mistake. But now that he had Karlsson in his sights, other seemingly unconnected strands began tying together. The victims of the airline crashes, for example, started making a lot more sense.
Start with Erik Vaughn. The man was a sworn enemy of the Panama Canal expansion. Storm called and quizzed Carlos Villante, catching the purported deputy director of the Autoridad del Canal de Panama just as he was going to bed. Villante had confirmed that Karlsson Logistics had more canal-related shipping routes than any other company, and therefore had the most to gain from the canal’s expansion.
Furthermore, Villante had said, Karlsson Logistics’s own explosion from a small Swedish shipping company into a global behemoth had left it highly leveraged. It was likely that without the canal’s expansion, the company would struggle to maintain the revenue growth that allowed it to meet an aggressive and rapidly increasing series of debt payments.
Jared Stack, who had unexpectedly taken Vaughn’s place as an impediment to funding for the canal expansion, had also become an enemy to Ingrid Karlsson. And he was also now dead — the victim of what was supposed to look like a tawdry death for a misbehaving congressman and would have been investigated as such had no one been the wiser.
Sometime midway through the trip north, Storm’s phone started ringing. When he checked the caller ID, it came up as restricted. The cubby. He ignored it and kept flipping through a mental Rolodex of other plane crash victims and finding others, both in Pennsylvania and the Emirates, who would have raised Ingrid Karlsson’s ire.
One was Viktor Schultz. As the head of Tariffs and Trade for the European Union, he had pushed relentlessly for higher excises on goods coming into the EU. In doing so, he had made himself an anathema to Karlsson, who was a free trade fanatic.
Another was Gunther Neubauer. The legislator had been called the Ted Cruz of Germany for his uncompromising stances on issues of great importance to him. His agenda was similarly reactionary: he was the leading voice calling for Germany to completely withdraw from the European Union. Many believed that if he succeeded, the EU itself would fold. That would have been a crushing blow to Karlsson’s vision of a world without borders.
There were others with no real connection to Ingrid Karlsson — like Pi, the fruitarian cult leader. Not that anyone would miss him.
But that was part of what made Karlsson’s attack so cunning. It was nearly impossible to separate the real targets from the collateral damage.
How she had known what planes they would be on — and where those planes would be — was no special mystery. The world’s aviation authorities had some of the more easily hacked computer systems. And the airlines weren’t much better. Meshing passenger manifests and flight plans was not especially difficult, especially when both were in their respective databases well ahead of time. It was possible Ingrid Karlsson had a vast enemies list and that she had picked off the few who happened to be in the air on the days she decided to use the laser. This may have merely been the start of a massive cleansing.
At the top of that list, it now seemed clear, was Brigitte Bildt, the woman who knew about her boss’s plan, the woman who had been traveling to the United States to expose everything. Storm wondered how much Jones really knew about her visit and what she was going to say when she arrived. Probably a lot more than he let on, as usual. Probably everything.
By the time Storm arrived in Cairo — at roughly the same time as the rising sun — he felt like he had it figured out. And yet before he went full tilt after the Warrior Princess, he had one last errand to complete.
That was why he had come to the middle of 6 October Bridge. He quickly disembarked from the truck’s cab and went around to the trailer, which he had already unlocked. It turned out the combination was Ahmed’s date of birth: 12-23-74.
Storm shoved the metal box that contained the promethium out of the back of the trailer. He lowered it from the bed of the truck onto the pavement. His actions were being accompanied by what was now a line of drivers honking at him for clogging a lane of traffic. This, Storm knew, was ordinarily how right-of-way was established in many Middle Eastern countries: the car with the loudest horn got to go first.