by Roland Smith
I’d seen that look on Eben’s face up close and personal. It wasn’t pleasant.
“Everett didn’t fare much better,” Boone said. “The woman and the kids had boarding passes when they walked into the airport, and carry-on bags. They went directly to the TSA security line. Everett couldn’t follow them through without a ticket. It took him fifteen minutes to get one. In that time fifty-seven flights took off. The woman and the kids were gone. X-Ray is checking all the airline manifests for a woman and two kids for that time period, but so far he’s coming up empty. She probably got past TSA and handed the kids off to other people. She might have even split them up. Not counting the two kids, that’s a minimum of three people in the ghost cell operating here in D.C. Four, if you count Malak. Five, if you count Amun Massri, who paid a visit to Malak last night at the safe house. That’s a lot of terrorist ghosts floating around town.”
I knew that Amun Massri was the guy who’d set the bomb at Independence Hall that killed Malak’s twin sister. According to Malak, Amun was the key to finding out who was running the ghost cell.
“What did Amun want with Malak?” Angela asked.
“Ziv didn’t say, and I’m not sure he knows. What I do know is that the ghost cell is made up of the best operatives I’ve ever seen. Wherever they go they assume they’re being followed by well-trained professionals.”
“Maybe they knew they were being followed,” I said.
Boone shook his head. “Eben and Everett are pros. But they got bested today.”
“What else did Ziv say?” Angela asked.
“He said to say hello to you two.” Boone smiled. “By the way, what did he look like when you talked to him at Independence Park?”
“He looked like a Philadelphia cop,” I said.
“Midfifties,” Angela added. “Blue eyes, a little overweight, slight accent, bald.”
“Today he had brown hair, brown eyes, mustache, glasses, and was dressed in a nice business suit with a pistol underneath his jacket. That will probably be the Warren Parker you see tonight, minus the pistol. If something goes down at the concert we’ll have Vanessa, me, Ziv, Marie, Art, and maybe Pat Callaghan, although I don’t know what Pat is up to yet.”
Marie and Art were our parents’ personal assistants, or PAs. Mom and Roger didn’t know it, but they were also their bodyguards and worked for SOS. They were waiting for us when we returned to the East Room.
Marie and Art
Marie and Art were younger than the other members of SOS by at least two decades.
Marie was petite with thick black hair. Her brown eyes were clear, alert, and a bit exotic. She looked like she had some Native American blood running through her veins.
Art was just the opposite of Marie. He was tall, muscular, with curly red hair, freckles, and blue eyes. Both of them had nice smiles.
Angela and I had seen them backstage at the Electric Factory the night before in Philadelphia, but we hadn’t met them formally.
“I’m Marie.”
“I’m Art.”
Angela and I shook their hands.
“Best PAs in the business,” Buddy T. said. “Your parents are lucky I found them.”
Buddy T. did not find them. Boone had told Heather Hughes, the president of the record company, to hire them. We still hadn’t figured out how Heather fit into all of this. All we knew was that she did anything Boone asked her to do, like hire the two PAs/covert operatives standing in front of us. They knew that we knew—and we knew that they knew—that Buddy T. knew nothing about why they were really there.
“Your parents are holding a press conference with the First Daughter,” Marie said. “When they finish they’re going up to the Solarium and would like to have you join them.”
Buddy T. gave us a sour look. Well, I should say a sourer look.
“We weren’t invited,” Art said cheerfully.
“When you see ’em,” Buddy T. said, “ask ’em if they might have some time to talk to their manager about a little thing called their concert tour!”
His cell phone rang. He pulled it from his belt clip and put it to his ear.
Malak walked down the path to the Potomac. It had been years since she’d been on the river. When she was stationed at the White House she was on the Secret Service sculling team. The boat tied up to the small dock was a kayak, not a scull. Nevertheless, she was looking forward to the short paddle to the Georgetown part of D.C.
As usual, Amun had thought of everything. Inside the red kayak was a lightweight wetsuit in her size, a helmet, a pair of gloves, a waterproof bag, even a water bottle. Malak stripped off her clothes, pulled on the wetsuit, then zipped her clothes into the waterproof bag along with her small pack and stowed it behind the seat.
She pushed a few feet away from the dock, found her balance and her stroke, then plunged into the main current. And for a few glorious minutes she was no longer Anmar, the Leopard, she was Malak Tucker the Secret Service agent…
Heady times. Traveling on Air Force One, protecting the most powerful man in the world with the best group of people she had ever worked with. She had three families back then—the First Family, her own family, and her Secret Service family. It was difficult to juggle all of them, but hard as it was, it was nothing compared to the tightrope she was on now.
She scanned the banks on both sides of the river. She didn’t see anyone watching her, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. An anonymous e-mail may have been sent, something like…
I’ll meet you for a jog along the Potomac on Chain Bridge at 1 p.m. Look for a red kayak. I’ll expect to hear from you.
Amun always knew where she had been and where to find her—almost always. It had taken a lot of work, but she had managed to slip his ghost watchers for a few precious minutes in Philadelphia with Ziv and Dirk’s help. It had been very dangerous for all of them, but worth it—at least for her.
As Malak neared the boathouse she thought about her old sculling partners. Amanda, Pat, and Charlie. It had been difficult for them to get time off at the same time to practice. They called their four-person team the Scull and Crossbones. They even had T-shirts made with a vertical scull as the skull and two crossed sculling oars beneath as the crossbones. If they couldn’t get off during the day together, they would scull on the Potomac at night.
What would my old friends think of me now, Malak thought as she paddled up to the boathouse. They would shoot me dead like an escaped leopard from the National Zoo.
With a sigh she took the waterproof bag with her pack and clothes out of the kayak. No one at the busy boathouse gave her a second look as she made her way to the restroom to change, which had been the entire reason for the kayak and wetsuit. Who would suspect a middle-aged woman in a kayak of being a notorious international terrorist?
When Malak stepped back out, wearing sunglasses and with her hair tucked under a worn Washington Nationals baseball cap, she found Amun waiting for her. She figured he had had a spotter along the Potomac. She hadn’t told him when to expect her at the boathouse.
“Any problems?” he asked.
“Of course not,” Malak answered, wondering for the thousandth time how Amun had gotten so far up in the ghost cell, and how he had managed to remain at large. He was always nervous and shifty-looking. She would have spotted him as a potential threat from a hundred yards away. “You need to relax. You’re telegraphing your tension.”
Amun gave her a petulant frown. “If you knew what our instructions were, you’d be tense too.”
“Take a deep breath,” Malak said. “Let’s walk.”
They started up to the parking lot.
“What are our instructions?” Malak asked.
“I can’t tell you yet. All I can say is that it’s the most dangerous and complicated mission we’ve ever undertaken.”
“All the more reason to be calm,” Malak said with a smile, knowing better than to push him for the information.
Amun returned the smile…finally.
<
br /> Malak laughed. “That’s better. You now look like a Washingtonian enjoying a crisp, sunny day.”
Amun had been on edge ever since they entered the country illegally from Mexico, where his friend and mentor, Salim Kazi, had been murdered. Salim had not been a member of the ghost cell. For lack of a better word he was a freelance terrorist associated with several terrorist groups. He was not driven by religious idealism but by his own fame.
When Aaron Lavi videoed the three of them at a Paris café, it was Salim and Amun who tracked him down and killed him. A tactical blunder. Aaron stashed the tape before they reached him. Aaron was an Israeli Mossad agent, and worse, he was the younger brother of another Mossad agent, named Eben Lavi. It was only a matter of time before Eben tracked them down and avenged his brother.
Ziv made Salim’s death look like a random killing. Disguised as a Tijuana thug, he confronted them outside of a restaurant the night before they were to cross the border into the United States. A scuffle broke out. When it was over, Salim was dead with a knife in his heart and Ziv was gone.
Malak had no regrets about Salim’s assassination. She would have killed him herself if she could have without exposing her cover. And she would have no regrets about killing Amun either, but she needed him. He was the key to finding out who was in charge of the ghost cell. With Salim gone, the impulsive Amun was now dependent on the more seasoned and experienced Anmar. And that was just the way the Leopard wanted it.
“I have a surprise for you,” Amun said.
Malak did not like surprises, nor did Anmar, the Leopard. “What is it?”
“If I told you it would not be a surprise,” Amun answered. “I think you’ll be pleased.”
Malak doubted it.
Ziv watched the Leopard and Amun climb into the nondescript Toyota sedan. He waited for them to back out of the boathouse parking lot and pull into traffic before backing his own vehicle out. He was in no hurry. He had put a tracking device on Amun’s Toyota while he was down at the dock. Malak also carried a tracking device cleverly concealed as a clasp on her pack. He only wished she had been able to put a similar device on the woman’s car where she had spent the night, or better yet, on her person before she left the house with her two children. But it was too dangerous for her to carry such things around. If a member of the ghost cell found her with a tracking device, they would report it immediately and his dear Malak would be dead within hours or, worse, captured and tortured until she told them what she was doing and what she knew.
Ziv had sent the SOS team on what the Americans might call a wild goose chase, but to his surprise they had found the woman’s SUV in the ocean of D.C. traffic. This spoke well of their capabilities. The fact that Eben and Everett had lost the woman and her children at the airport did not surprise him at all. The ghost cell was incredibly well-trained, resourceful, and disciplined. In a way, Ziv was glad Eben and Everett had lost the woman and children. It gave the SOS team an idea of what they were dealing with. If he’d been tasked to track the woman and children, he would have probably lost them too.
Amun pulled the Toyota into a parking garage and Ziv lost the signal.
Here we go, he thought, switching to Malak’s signal in case they switched cars or started walking.
Ziv circled the block slowly as if he were looking for a parking space. The third time around he found one, backed in, and waited. Five minutes later Malak’s signal came online.
They were on foot.
Pat Callaghan
Angela, P.K., and I met Mom, Roger, and Bethany in the Solarium. Bethany Culpepper was petite with dark shoulder-length hair, brown eyes, and a warm smile.
“It’s good to finally meet you,” she said, shaking our hands.
Herbal tea and plates of cookies were set out, either left over from the brunch or baked fresh by Conrad. Bethany talked to us for a few minutes, then took P.K. away so we could have some alone time.
As soon as she and P.K. left, Mom and Roger slumped on the presidential furniture.
“You were smart to skip the brunch,” Mom said. “I mean, it was really nice, but we are beyond exhausted. How are you two holding up?”
“Good,” Angela and I said in unison.
“P.K. took us on a tour of the house,” I said. “He’s a nice kid.”
“How was your meeting with the president?” Roger asked.
“Brief,” Angela said.
“It was nice of him to give you some time,” Roger said. “He’s a busy man.”
At Angela’s suggestion we had taken off our Seamasters and put them in our pockets. She said that her dad was sure to recognize the watches as the same model Malak wore.
They talked about the concert the night before, and the upcoming concert in the East Room, and then told us that in order to make the next concert on the tour we’d have to leave right after the East Room concert.
“Boone brought the motor coach over,” Roger said. “It’s parked inside one of the security gates, and he’s getting it ready to go. We’ll have to drive all night to get to the next gig.”
Mom yawned.
Roger yawned.
Angela yawned.
I stifled a yawn.
Mom laughed. “I guess we could all use a little nap.”
We went to our respective rooms. I was in mine only long enough to throw what I’d brought into the White House into a bag and leave. When I got downstairs a Secret Service agent (not Call or Norton) asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to the motor coach. He didn’t follow me, but he informed every other agent in the White House that I was coming their way. The agents all nodded as I passed and reported my progress. With the surveillance cameras and agents I figured there were a dozen people watching every step I took. I started to get a little idea of what it must be like for P.K. to live in the “glass house,” as J.R. called it. I’d been inside less than twenty-four hours, and I was already starting to feel claustrophobic. And this was from someone who had lived most of his life on a tiny sailboat. How did the First Family do this?
Our motor coach was surrounded by even more security than the Match semi had been. I started toward the door but was blocked by an agent.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“Home,” I said.
The door opened.
“Let him in,” the president of the United States said. “It is his home, and this Boone character isn’t much of a tour guide.”
“Do you want me to ask Mr. Boone to vacate the premises?” the agent said.
J.R. laughed. “Fred, I really hope that no one ever says that to you in your own home. I don’t think Mr. Boone voted for me, but he is the driver of the premises, and we’re having a nice conversation. And I need you to do me a favor. Clear those roadies through the gate. I’ll vouch for them.”
“With all due respect, sir, you don’t know them.”
“With all due respect, Fred, I’m the president of the United States. Let them in.”
I stepped into the motor coach, and J.R. shut the door.
Boone was sitting at the kitchen table with Croc at his feet. “Thanks for clearing the roadies,” Boone said. “And with all due respect, I did vote for you. Twice.”
J.R. smiled and joined Boone at the table. “Make yourself at home, Q. After all, it is your home. We’re just chewing the fat. Talking about the good old days, which weren’t always good, but they were a lot simpler than they are now. How do you like the watch?”
I’d slipped it back on before I came down. “It’s great,” I said. “Boone told us about the phone number.”
“Good. You can call me anytime you want. Well, within reason.”
I couldn’t even imagine calling the president of the United States to chitchat. “I thought you were going golfing,” I said.
“I hate to golf,” J.R. said. “But I love walking around the links. It’s about the only time I can get outside by myself, more or less, aside from pacing around the Rose Garden. On the
way there I decided to take in a few innings of baseball, then I told the Secret Service I wanted to go bowling.” He laughed. “That threw them because we have a lane in the basement of the White House, which P.K. and I use once in a while. I told them that I wanted to go to a public alley. We pulled into the lot, and I said that I wanted to go back to the White House. When we got here, which the detail was very relieved about, I saw Ty washing your windshield, and I asked him for a private tour. I think being inside here with the ancient cowboy hippie is making them more nervous than the bowling alley idea. I pull this two or three times a year. You’d think they’d be used to it by now.”
“I don’t know how you can live in the White House,” I said without thinking. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“No, you’re right,” J.R. said. “It’s stifling, especially for Will, but we try to keep it as interesting as we can for him. Did he show you the secret passages?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” J.R. said. “And the Secret Service radio?”
“You know about that too?”
“The Secret Service is very good at its job. They reported that he lifted one of the old radios immediately. I told them to let him keep it and make sure that he got the encrypted codes once in a while. They also told me he was on the move last night through the passages. Why do you think we gave him that bedroom? That kid is really inquisitive. He found the passages completely on his own, which I knew he would. Norton made sure he didn’t roust you from the waiting room until he was sure that Will got the message over the radio.”