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  They had met the first time by arrangement in Paris at the touristy sidewalk café Deux Magots, on Boulevard Saint-Germain across from the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church. The place had been crowded and in fact DeCamp, who’d arrived a half hour early to look over the situation, had waited twenty minutes before getting a table. When Wolfhardt had walked across the street from the church, and not from a cab or the metro, it had struck DeCamp that the man had also arrived early as a precaution.

  “It’s a good thing to be cautious,” DeCamp said as the German sat down.

  The waiter came and he ordered a café au lait and waited until it was set before him before he got down to business. “You’ve come highly recommended.”

  Nothing was required for DeCamp to say.

  “I have a job for a man of your skills. An assassination.”

  DeCamp relaxed and he nodded. No doubt the German had made his preparations, careful to make absolutely certain that no one could hear their conversation. The area had been swept for bugs and listening devices, and the man’s operatives were certainly nearby, otherwise he would not have spoken so openly

  “I make no kills on French soil.”

  “This would be in Berlin,” Wolfhardt said. “A German businessman who is a principal in the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. He has a lake house outside the city.”

  “Would there be family, staff, security?”

  “Yes, all of that.”

  “And they would have to be eliminated as well?”

  Wolfhardt shrugged, the gesture suggesting a near-total indifference. “That would be up to your discretion. For your own protection. But I will offer five hundred thousand euros for the man. Nothing for the others.”

  “Two fifty now, and the rest on completion.”

  “Agreed,” Wolfhardt said, and he took a CD in a jewel case out of his jacket pocket and handed it across the table. The disk was labeled Beethoven Sinfonien 2 & 8, the London Classical Players, Roger Norrington. “You may need time to study the material before you accept the primary payment.”

  “That’s not necessary,” DeCamp said. He took a plain business card, no name, address, or phone number, only two sets of numbers — the first with nine digits, the second with ten — and slid it across to the German. “I’ll begin immediately after the initial deposit.”

  Wolfhardt nodded curtly. “You’ll have the funds within twenty-four hours,” he said, and he rose to leave.

  Driving toward Miami, DeCamp remembered that first meeting clearly. Up until the end, the German had been coolly professional, but just before he’d walked away, he’d said one more thing, his tone at that point almost congenial, almost friendly, one comrade in arms to another. “Good hunting,” he’d said.

  The businessman’s name was Rolph Wittgen, and as it turned out the house staff had been dismissed early, and the security cameras and devices switched off. The only other person there that night was Wittgen’s mistress. Killing both of them in the act of lovemaking and getting away had been simple, and two days later the second payment had shown up in his Channel Islands account. The entire affair from the meeting in Paris until the final payment had taken less than one week.

  They’d met once again for a similar assassination, and then again fourteen months ago at a different café in Paris, and that time Wolfhardt had presented the same coolly professional demeanor as before, not questioning DeCamp’s abilities to carry out the assignment — that of sabotaging the Hutchinson Island reactor — despite the size and complexity of the operations.

  No questions, ever, neither before nor after an assignment, not until just now over the sat phone. It was puzzling, and DeCamp disliked puzzles unless they were of his own making. But as long as the money arrived as promised he decided not to take Wolfhardt’s changed attitude as a sign of anything other than the unexpected length of time the assignment had taken.

  Yet DeCamp had the disquieting feeling that the men he had worked for seventeen years ago had displayed the same change of attitude just before the Buffalo Battalion had been disbanded. They had been cutting their losses, disassociating themselves with the very men they had directed into battle. The war in Angola had been terminated, to no one’s satisfaction, and the Battalion had been dismantled and swept under the rug, its continued existence a potential embarrassment to the South African government.

  “If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on the desert sands in vain, beware the anger of the legions!”

  Anger indeed, he thought. They had no idea what he was capable of. Always had been. Setting the LED counters ten minutes back, for instance. No mercy. No prisoners. No quarter.

  And now there was the possibility of more assignments. More money.

  EIGHT

  Kirk McGarvey, dressed in jeans, deck shoes, a white long-sleeved shirt, and a khaki sports coat, got out of his rented Chevy and walked inside the National Air Guard’s main hangar at Homestead Air Force Base a few miles south of Miami, pretty much in the same bad mood he’d been in for the past eighteen months. He was a tall man, in very good physical condition because he’d worked out just about every day of his life, and more than once that regimen had save his life. In his early fifties, still not too slowed down or mellowed even after a twenty-plus-year career with the CIA — mostly as a black ops field officer, which meant killings, but for short stints as deputy director of operations and director of the entire Company — he was alone as he’d never thought he would be at this stage of his life.

  His partner, Alan Lundgren, slightly built with wire-rimmed reading glasses and a buzz cut, was formerly an FBI counterterrorism special agent. He had arrived on base a half hour earlier and was explaining the facts of life to a group of seven National Nuclear Security Administration Rapid Response team recruits gathered around him just to the left of the open service doors, about the distinct possibility of facing a terrorist one-on-one, which could develop into a hand-to-hand, life-or-death situation. All of them were nuclear scientists or engineers, not combat specialists, who’d signed on with the NNSA to help stop terrorist nuclear attacks on the U.S. Their eyes were wide; this was something completely new for them, and they were paying attention to what they were being told, and no one noticed that someone without credentials around his neck had come in.

  It was an opening act that McGarvey and Lundgren had used at all the other training sessions like this one, their special ops assignment to bring all twenty of NNSA’S Rapid Response teams up to real-world speed.

  A couple of mechanics were working on an F-15D Eagle jet fighter on the far side of the hangar, and parked in the middle of the big space was a MH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter, its rotors drooping, nobody around it just now.

  McGarvey hung back to give someone a chance to spot him, and in that brief few moments of inaction his thoughts were drawn back eighteen months and a horribly black haze dropped over him like a dense smoke cloud from an oil fire. His last assignment as a freelance field officer for the CIA before he’d quit for good — he hoped — when the organization he’d gone up against had murdered his son-in-law, Todd Van Buren, who’d been codirector along with McGarvey’s daughter, Elizabeth, of the CIA’s training facility outside Williamsburg. Todd been on his way back there after meeting with an old friend in Washington when a pair of gunmen forced him off I-95 in broad daylight and shot him to death, putting a final insurance round into the back of his head even though he had already been dead.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. McGarvey had struck back, and in retaliation the same group had buried an IED in the road at Arlington Cemetery’s south gate where McGarvey’s wife, Kathleen, and their daughter, Elizabeth, were leaving after Todd’s funeral, killing them both. And just like that he’d been alone; everything he’d worked for all of his life wiped out; the real reason, if he was being honest with himself, that he had made a career in service to his country was that he’d wanted to make America safe not simply for Americans, but specifically for his family, for the pe
ople he loved. And he knew a lot of people over at the CIA and National Security Agency and every other U.S. intelligence agency who felt the same, because it sure as hell wasn’t about the money, or for most of them not even the thrill of operations, of being in the know.

  Nothing was the same for him after that day. Todd’s death had hardened his soul, but killing Katy and Liz had eliminated it. His enemies, America’s enemies, any enemy had become fair game. Any method reasonable. No trials, no plea bargains, no deals, just destruction. He’d been an assassin for the CIA, his operations sanctioned, or at least most of them after the fact, but now everything was different. Simply put, he’d become a killing machine, and the job he’d been hired to do by the NNSA was to train its rapid response scientists how to recognize and deal with such a person, which had been a good thing for him, because at least for now he was in the role of a teacher and not of a killer.

  Just lately, however, he had begun to chafe at the bit. Tough times and rough beasts were gathering for a strike. He could feel it in his bones, sense it in what for him had become like a strong electrical charge in the air, and his heart had begun to harden further.

  Still no one in the group Lundgren was talking to had looked up, and this is how it was every other time, even though word must have spread from the other teams. It was a sloppiness that could get them killed one of these days, and stop them from preventing an act of nuclear terrorism, and it pissed him off.

  He pulled his Wilson Tactical Supergrade Compact .45 ADCAP pistol out of the holster at the small of his back under his jacket and strode the last thirty feet to where the nearest man in the group stood listening to Lundgren tell them to make sure to maintain a peripheral awareness at all times and jammed the barrel of the pistol into the man’s temple.

  Before the man or anyone else could react, McGarvey cocked the hammer. “You’re dead,” he said, and he pulled the trigger, the firing pin slapping on an empty chamber.

  “Jesus H. Christ.” The man reared back, almost going to his knees.

  McGarvey withdrew his pistol, ejected the empty magazine which he pocketed, slapped another into the handle, and charged the weapon before he reholstered it. “You weren’t listening.”

  “We’re not some fucking cowboys here!” the group’s team leader, Dr. Stephan Ainsle, shouted. He was a youngish, curly-headed man with a prominent Adam’s apple and intensely dark eyes, and he was shaken, too. They all were. But Lundgren had warned them from the get-go to keep on their toes, to expect the unexpected; it was a vital part of the job they would be expected to do once they were fully trained.

  “Then you’d better learn to get on the horse, Doctor, or else you’ll be worthless to the program.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Ainsle said, and he started to turn away, more frightened than he wanted to admit than angry.

  “You’re not in the program until we sign you off,” McGarvey said, holding his temper in check. He’d seen guys like this coming out of the Farm, with attitudes that got them killed or at least burned within their first ninety days in the field. It wasn’t the training, it was the certainty that they were superior to the trigger-pullers. They were the intellects who would solve every problem with their minds, with superior reasoning. And such a line of thinking was common among these types.

  Ainsle looked at the others on his team, still not convinced to open his mind. “I don’t need this shit.”

  “But we need you, Doctor,” McGarvey said. “You signed on to the program because you obviously thought so, too. If you’ll listen up maybe we can teach you how to survive long enough to find and disarm a nuclear weapon before it detonates, maybe in downtown Washington or New York.”

  It had become a matter of face now, Ainsle’s education versus a pair of men he took to be nothing more than well-connected thugs, even though he might know something of McGarvey’s background. But unless he was convinced that he and his entire team would be scrubbed, which, in McGarvey’s estimation would be too bad, he would walk away now. They’d left the safety of academia, for whatever reasons, to volunteer for some tough training, and at least a two-year commitment to serve their country in a potentially hot zone. They were definitely needed.

  “I know why you guys are here, and it sure as hell isn’t for the glamour or big bucks; you won’t have a new theory named after you, at least not while you’re with us. Nor will your names ever get in the media. No awards, no Nobel Prizes, no advancement at your labs.” McGarvey managed to grin. “Hell, you probably won’t even get women out of this.”

  One of the younger scientists smiled and shook his head. “I knew it,” he said. He glanced at Ainsle and lifted a shoulder.

  Still Ainsle, who was currently working on a government-funded fusion research project at Cal Tech, hesitated, and McGarvey wanted to go over to him and wipe the smug, superior expression off the man’s face. But he loosened up, so that they could all see it.

  “Come on, Doc, make my day,” McGarvey said.

  “Dirty Harry,” Ainsle said, and the others laughed. “All right, so I’m an asshole. But I’m a goddamned smart asshole and I want to help stop the bad guys.”

  “Good enough,” McGarvey said. “Because from this point on I want you to keep two things at the front of your minds. It’s not a matter of if an attempt will be made to conduct an act of nuclear terrorism on American soil, but when it will happen.”

  “And the second is to expect the unexpected,” Lundgren said from behind them. He’d slipped away while the team had given McGarvey its full attention. It was a part of what he called his and McGarvey’s dog and pony show.

  They turned around.

  Lundgren stood over a medium-sized aluminum suitcase that contained a Russian-made compact nuclear demolition device. The cover was open and a single red light flashed beneath a LED display that was counting down, and had just passed sixty seconds.

  Ainsle was the first to recover. “That’s a realistic-looking mock-up.”

  “You willing to bet your life that it’s a fake?” McGarvey asked. In fact it wasn’t a mock-up, though its physics package had been removed. The Russian-made gadgets leaked a lot more rems than ours did.

  “We have equipment that can neutralize the firing circuits,” Ainsle said. “We’ve gotten this close, the rest is easy.”

  “Fair enough,” McGarvey said. “Do it.”

  Ainsle glanced toward the Rapid Response team van parked just outside. “Our stuff is in the van.”

  “Get it.”

  “Fifty seconds,” Lundgren said.

  “You’re running out of time,” McGarvey prompted.

  “I’ll get it,” one of the team members said, but before he could move, McGarvey pulled out his pistol and pointed at him.

  “Holy shit, that’s loaded!”

  “Yes, it is,” McGarvey replied reasonably.

  “Forty-five seconds!” Lundgren suddenly screamed.

  The mechanics working on the jet fighter glanced over, but then went back to what they were doing. They had been briefed.

  “ Allahu akbar! ” Lundgren screamed. He picked up a short stock version of the AK-47 and fired a short burst of blanks into the air, the noise impressive. “Infidels! Die!”

  Ainsle made to move toward the suitcase nuke but stopped short when Lundgren aimed the AK at his chest.

  “Are you willing to die for your country, Dr. Ainsle?” Lundgren asked. “Thirty seconds.”

  “Are any of you?” McGarvey demanded.

  No one moved. No one said a thing. And it struck McGarvey that they were like sheep being led to the slaughter, or more like rabbits who froze rather than ran when they knew they were about to be spotted by the hunter and killed.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Lundgren announced.

  “Anyone?” McGarvey prompted.

  “Ten seconds,” Lundgren said. “Nine … eight…”

  At 00 the red light stopped flashing and the LED went blank.

  “What happened?” McGarvey asked,
but it was a rhetorical question and Ainsle and the others knew it. “You didn’t expect the unexpected and none of you were willing to give your life to try to stop the bomb from detonating.”

  “We would have given our lives for nothing,” Ainsle said.

  “In this case you would have been right. But you didn’t come here prepared to win.”

  “All well and good for you to say with blanks in the rifle, and with a device that was a dud,” Ainsle said. “In the field, facing an actual nuclear threat, it’d be a little different.”

  “He knows from firsthand experience,” Lundgren said. “Believe me the man knows.”

  A look of recognition came into one of the team member’s face. “Holy shit, you were the guy in San Francisco. I was in grad school and my dad who’s FBI told me about it. Not the whole thing, but some of it.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Ainsle demanded, though he was clearly impressed.

  “Later,” McGarvey said. “Right now we’re going to take this scenario step-by-step so that you can save your own lives long enough to save everyone else’s. Are you on board?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ainsle replied sincerely and without hesitation.

  NINE

  Gail took the stairs up to the second floor of the South Service Building two at a time, her heart racing as fast as the thoughts in her head. On the way across from the visitors center her imagination had jumped all over the place, out of control for the most part, but now that she was here, at the scene of the possible trouble, she was calming down. It was almost liberating. Now she could get on with doing the job she’d been hired to do. Accidents and terrorism were on the minds of everyone who worked in or near nuclear power stations. Since 9/11 those kinds of fears had become deeply embedded in everyone’s subconscious, hers included.

  She’d said nothing to the pair of security officers at the front entrance. Wager hadn’t spread the word yet, but they knew something had to be going on; the Ice Maiden never ran around like this unless something was in the wind. And she could feel their eyes on her back.