by Tom Clancy
She’d told him to quit. He told her he’d finally found a place for himself in this world, after all the pain he’d caused her. There was no quitting now. Not ever.
He wanted to share all of those thoughts with Khodai—they were kindred spirits—but the bell rang and the elevator arrived. They stepped inside, and the colonel seemed to grow paler as the doors shut.
They rode in silence to the fifth floor, the doors opened, and Moore quickly spotted a man silhouetted in the stairwell door frame at the opposite end of the corridor—he was a Pakistani operative from ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence). The cell phone plastered to the agent’s ear reminded Moore to reach into his own pocket for his smartphone so he could call the others and tell them they were nearing the door, but then he realized he’d left the phone down in the car, damn it.
They reached the door, and Moore knocked and said, “It’s me, guys.”
The door swung open, and one of his colleagues, Regina Harris, answered and invited Khodai into the room. Douglas Stone was with her as well.
“Left my phone down in the car,” said Moore. “I’ll be right back.”
Moore started off down the hallway, and now he spied a second agent at the elevators. Smart move—the ISI now controlled the foot traffic for the entire fifth floor. The elevator man was a short, scruffy-faced dude with large brown eyes and was talking nervously into his phone. He wore a blue dress shirt, brown slacks, and black sneakers, and his features seemed more rodent than human.
When the man spotted Moore, he lowered his phone and started back down the hall, toward the stairwell, and for a second this puzzled Moore. He walked a few more steps, then froze and whirled toward the room.
The explosion tore through the hallway, heaving up a chute of flames and a mountain of rubble that cut off Moore from the elevator and knocked him flat onto his rump. Next came the smoke pouring out of the room and billowing in thick clouds down the hall. Moore rolled onto his hands and knees, gasping curses as his eyes burned and the air grew thick with the stench of the bomb. His thoughts raced, taking him back to every reservation the colonel had mentioned, as though all of those doubts had manifested themselves in the explosion. Moore imagined Khodai and his colleagues being ripped apart, and that image drove him onto his feet and toward the now-empty stairwell—
After the bastard who’d run off.
The chase left no time to feel guilty, and for that Moore was thankful. If he paused, even for a second, to reflect on the fact that he’d convinced Khodai to “do the right thing,” only to get the man killed because of his team’s lapse in security, he might break down. And that was, perhaps, Moore’s greatest weakness. He’d once been described in an After-Action Report as “an immensely passionate man who cared deeply for his colleagues,” which of course explained why a particular face from his Navy SEAL past never stopped haunting him, and Khodai’s sudden loss only reminded him of that night.
Moore burst into the stairwell and spotted the man charging downward. Gritting his teeth, Moore raced after him, using the railing to take three and four stairs at a time and swearing over the fact that his pistol was still down in the car. They’d been permitted to use the hotel as a meeting place, but both hotel security and the local police had been adamant about their weapons: None would be allowed inside the building. There’d been no room for negotiation on this point, and while Moore and his colleagues had access to a number of weapons that could bypass security, they’d opted to honor the request, lest they risk an already tenuous relationship. Moore had to assume that if the man had made it past the ISI security checkpoint, then he wasn’t armed. But Moore had also assumed that their hotel room was a safe meeting place. They’d chosen one of the four vacant rooms on the fifth floor that faced the street so they could observe comings and goings of guests and traffic patterns. Any abrupt changes were early clues that something was about to happen, and they liked to call that an early-warning system for the astute. While they hadn’t had access to a bomb-sniffing dog, they had scanned the room for electronic devices and had been using it for a few weeks without incident. That these thugs had managed to get explosives inside was infuriating and heartbreaking. Khodai had passed through screening with no problems, thus Moore had to assume the man had not been wired …unless of course the security checkpoint itself was a fake, the man there working for the Taliban …
The little guy kept a blistering pace, hit the first floor, and burst out of the stairwell door, with Moore about six seconds behind him.
A couple of breaths later and Moore was out the door, swinging his head left toward the main lobby, then right toward a long hall leading off to the spa, gym, and rear parking lot nestled at the corner of a large wooded area.
Meanwhile, the rest of the hotel was gripped in chaos, with alarms sounding, security personnel screaming, and hotel staff dashing everywhere as the smoke from the explosion began filtering into the air system with the pungent scent of explosives.
Stealing another look over his shoulder, the man sprinted for the door as Moore whirled and bounded after him, drawing the attention of two housekeepers, who were pointing at them and screaming for security. Good.
Moore closed the gap as the guy raised both hands and slammed into the rear door, swinging it open before he vanished outside. And three, two, one, Moore hit the door with a gasp, the cooler night enveloping him as he caught sight of the man sprinting toward the same parking lot where Moore had left his car. This was the best exit for him, with the woods beyond, but it would also take them past Moore’s car—and his pistol stowed inside.
Moore’s anger finally found his muscles. This guy would not get away. This was no longer a decision or even a goal but a cold, hard fact. Moore already envisioned his capture; it was simply time to make it so. As expected, his prey did not have the physical endurance that he did, and the man began to slow as he hit his lactate threshold, but Moore had a long way to go before he reached his …and so he darted up behind the man like a wolf and launched himself into a low kick to the guy’s left leg that sent him screaming and crashing onto the grass, just before both of them reached the asphalt.
There was an old and very well-known saying about Muay Thai fighting techniques: “Kick loses to punch, punch loses to knee, knee loses to elbow, elbow loses to kick.”
Well, this asshat had just lost it all to Moore’s kick, and now Moore seized the man’s wrists and maneuvered himself on top to straddle and pin him.
“Don’t move. You’re done!” Moore said in Urdu, the language most frequently used in the city.
The man lifted his head, struggling against Moore’s grip, but then his eyes narrowed and his mouth opened in—what? Horror? Shock?
Thunder boomed somewhere behind them. Familiar thunder. Terribly familiar …
At nearly the same time the man’s head exploded, showering Moore in blood and causing him to react on instinct, all muscle memory, no forethought, just self-preservation driving him away from the man and rolling onto his side.
He gasped, kept rolling, still in full control of his body, the evolutions of SEAL training never forgotten, the body remembering, responding, reacting.
The gun boomed two more times, the rounds burrowing into the dirt not six inches from Moore’s torso as he came onto his hands and knees and bolted off toward his car, right there, just ten meters away. That gun was a Russian-made Dragunov sniper’s rifle. Moore was certain of that. He’d fired them, watched them be fired, and been shot at by men using them. The weapon had a range of eight hundred meters, and up to thirteen hundred if the shooter was skilled and exploiting his scope. The ten-round detachable box magazine could keep this guy in business for a while.
Another shot punched a hole in the driver’s-side door as Moore reached into his pocket, hit his key fob, and the car chirped. He shifted around the vehicle, out of the sniper’s line of fire, and opened the passenger’s-side door.
The windshield shattered as another round punched through. Out of the glove box
came Moore’s Glock 30, the word AUSTRIA embossed on the .45-caliber pistol’s side. He came around the door, scanned the tree line and hotel beyond, and there he was, leaning forward on the roof of the two-story tech center next door.
The sniper wore a black woolen cap, but his face was clearly visible. Dark beard. Wide eyes. Broad nose. And Moore nodded inwardly over the Dragunov sniper’s rifle with the attached scope and big magazine that the sniper lifted higher, balancing it with one elbow propped on the ledge.
Even as Moore spotted him, the sniper saw Moore and fired three shots in rapid succession that hammered the door as Moore rushed back around the car, toward the driver’s side.
But then, just as the third shot echoed off, Moore bolted up and, cupping his gun hand in his left palm, returned fire, his rounds drilling into the concrete within inches of where the sniper had been perched, about forty meters away. That was beyond his pistol’s accurate range, but Moore figured the sniper wasn’t doing any ballistics homework at the moment, only ducking from wild bullets.
Four hotel security guards were already rushing into the parking lot area, and Moore pointed and shouted to them, “He’s up there! Get down!”
One guy rushed at Moore while the others darted behind several other parked cars.
“Don’t move!” the guard ordered—and then the sniper took off his head.
Another guard began barking into his radio.
When Moore returned his gaze to the building, he spotted the sniper on the far east side using a maintenance ladder to descend to the lot below, gliding swiftly, like an arachnid leaving its nest.
Moore sprinted away and the path grew uneven, the grass turning to gravel and then back to pavement. A narrow alley between the tech center and a row of small one-story offices behind it led northwest toward Aga Khan Road, the main thoroughfare in front of the hotel. The scent of sweet pork had filled the alley, as the hotel’s kitchen exhaust fans filtered in that direction, and Moore’s stomach growled even though a meal was hardly on his mind.
Without slowing, he turned left, his Glock leading the way, and there, not twenty meters ahead, sat an idling Toyota HiAce van with two gunmen hanging from the rear driver’s-side and rear passenger’s-side windows.
The sniper ran toward the rolling van and leapt into the passenger’s seat as the gunmen to the rear raised their rifles at Moore, who had the better part of two seconds to lunge down into a small alcove as the bricks above him shattered under automatic-weapons fire. Twice he tried to peer out to get a tag number, but the incoming was relentless, and by the time they ceased fire, the van was turning onto the main highway. Gone.
Moore rushed back to his car, grabbed his cell phone, and, with a trembling hand, tried to make a call. Then he just stopped himself and leaned back on his car as more security guys swarmed him, with their chief demanding answers.
He needed to call in the van, get eyes in the sky on that vehicle.
He needed to tell them what had happened.
Everyone was dead.
But all he could do was breathe.
Saidpur Village
Islamabad, Pakistan
Three Hours Later
Tucked tightly into the Margallah Hills overlooking Islamabad, Saidpur Village offered a picturesque view of the city and attracted a steady stream of tourists searching for what some guides called the “soul” of Pakistan. The guides said you could find it in Saidpur.
However, if the city had a soul, it had just grown darker. Columns of smoke still wafted up from the Marriott Hotel, cutting lines across the star-filled sky, and Moore stood there on the balcony of the safe house, cursing once more. The explosion had not only taken out their room but two other adjacent ones to the right and left, and before others could get near the area, the roof in that section of the building had collapsed.
With the assistance of three other operatives called in to help secure the area, along with a special forensics team and two crime scene specialists, Moore was able to work with private hotel security, the local police, and a five-man Inter-Services Intelligence team even while he fed a steady stream of misinformation to Associated Press reporters. By the time the story hit outlets like CNN, they were reporting that a Taliban bomb had gone off in the hotel and that the terrorists had claimed responsibility because they were seeking revenge for killings by Shiites of members of a Sunni extremist ally of the group known as Sipah-e-Sahaba. A Pakistan Army colonel had been inadvertently caught in the blast. Between the hard-to-remember names of the groups and the vague circumstances, Moore felt certain the story would continue to grow more convoluted. His colleagues in the room had carried nothing that would identify them as Americans or members of the CIA.
He turned away from the balcony and into a voice within his head: “I can’t disrupt their lives. My sons are in high school now. My wife was just promoted. She works right there in the tech center next door. Pakistan is our home. We’ll never leave.”
Moore clutched the stone rail, leaned over, lost his breath, and began to vomit. He just stood there, with his forehead balanced on his arm, waiting for it to pass, trying to release it all, though the bombing had, in effect, brought it all back. He’d spent years trying to repress the memories, grappling with them during countless sleepless night, fighting against the urge to take the easy way out and drink the pain away …And for the past few years he’d wanted to believe that he’d won.
And then this. He’d met his fellow operatives only a few weeks prior and hadn’t made anything other than a professional connection with them. Yes, he felt terrible over their loss, but it was Khodai, the torn colonel, who pained him the most …Moore had learned a lot about him, and the loss felt significant. How would Khodai’s nephew react to his uncle’s death? The lieutenant had thought he was helping both men, and while he must have known that Khodai would be endangering himself by talking to Moore, he probably denied any thoughts of his uncle being murdered.
Moore had promised to protect Khodai and his family. He’d failed on every level. When the police arrived at Khodai’s house just an hour ago, they’d found the man’s wife and sons stabbed to death, and the agent assigned to protect them was missing. The Taliban were so well connected, so thoroughly wired into the pulse of the city, that it seemed virtually impossible for Moore and his people to get any real work done. That was his depression talking, of course, but the Taliban had spotters everywhere, and no matter how hard he’d tried to blend in—growing the beard, wearing the local garb, speaking the language—they’d guessed who he was and what he was after.
He wiped his mouth and stood taller, glancing back to the city, to the lingering smoke, to the lights twinkling out to the horizon. He swallowed, mustered up the courage, and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
A few hours later, Moore was on a video call with Greg O’Hara, deputy director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. O’Hara was a fit man in his late fifties, with grayish-red hair and a hard, blue-eyed stare magnified by his glasses. He had a penchant for gold ties and must have owned a hundred of them. Moore gave him a capsule summary of what had happened, and they decided they would speak again in the morning, once the other teams had completed their investigations and logged their findings. Moore’s immediate boss, the chief of the Special Activities Division, would also participate in the call.
One of Moore’s local contacts, Israr Rana, an operative he’d recruited himself after spending the past two years in Afghanistan and Pakistan, arrived at the safe house. Rana was a college student in his mid-twenties, with a keen wit, birdlike features, and a passion for playing cricket. His sense of humor and boyish charm allowed him to gather remarkable amounts of intel for the Agency. That, coupled with his ancestry—his family had become fairly well known over the past century as both great soldiers and cunning businesspeople—made him a near-perfect operative.
Moore plopped into a chair, with Rana standing near the sofa. “Thanks for coming.”
“No problem, Money.”
That was Rana’s nickname for Moore—and it made sense. Rana was paid handsomely for his services.
“I need to know where the leak happened. Did we blow it from the get-go? Was it the Army, the Taliban, or both?”
Rana shook his head and made a face. “I’ll do everything I can to get you something. But for now, let me get you a drink. Something to help you sleep.”
Moore waved him off. “Nothing will help me sleep.”
Rana nodded. “I’m going to make some calls. Can I use the computer?”
“It’s over there.”
Moore retired to the bedroom, and within an hour he realized he’d been wrong. He drifted off into an exhausted sleep, floating relentlessly on black waves, until his heartbeat, like the thumping of a helicopter’s rotors, sent him bolting upright in a cold sweat. He glanced around the room, sighed, and collapsed back onto his pillow.
A half-hour later he was in his car, heading back to the scene. He glanced over at the shattered building, then at the tech center next door. He found a security guard from the tech center and, along with two local policemen, gained access to the building. They went up to the roof, where Moore had already been earlier and from where they’d collected the sniper’s shell casings to search for prints on them.