I started to say something, but she shook me off.
“Then one afternoon the doctor told me that there was no brain activity, that for all intents and purposes my baby was dead. They… wanted me to… they asked me if I would consent to having the respirator disconnected. What could I say? I screamed, I yelled at them, I argued with them. I prayed. For days.” The tears broke and cut silvery lines down her face. They looked like scars. “When I finally agreed it was so horrible. I kissed my baby and held his little hand while they stopped the machines. I put my face down to listen to his heartbeat, hoping that it would go on beating, but all I heard was one heartbeat. Just one, he died that quickly. One beat and then a dreadful silence. I felt him die, Joe. It was so awful, so terrible that I knew that I would never—could never feel anything worse.” She drank most of the second bottle. “It ruined me. My husband had left again after the second surgery. I guess to him Brian was already gone. My parents were long gone. I had no one else in my life. I continued to get sicker and I wound up in a psychiatric medical center for nearly three months. Are you shocked?”
She looked at me defiantly, but something in my expression must have reassured her. She nodded.
“In the hospital I had a counselor and she suggested that I look for something that would give me structure. I had no family left and she knew a recruiter. She wrote me a letter of recommendation and two weeks after discharge from hospital I was in the army. It became my life. From there I went to the SAS. I saw combat in a dozen places. I saw death. I caused death. None of it touched me. I believed that whatever had made me a person, a human being, was gone, buried in a little coffin with a tiny body. Both of us dead, killed by imperfect hearts.”
She wiped at the tears then stared with subdued surprise at the wetness on her fingers. “I hardly ever cry anymore. Except sometimes at night when I wake up from a dream of holding Brian’s hand and hearing his last heartbeat. I haven’t cried in years, Joe. Not in years.”
My mouth was dry and I drank some beer to be able to breathe.
Grace said, “When Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center I didn’t cry. I just got angry. When the bombs went off in the London subways, I tightened up my resolve. Grace Courtland, Major SAS, combat veteran, professional hard-ass.” She took a big breath, blew out her cheeks. “And then St. Michael’s. God! We went in there hard and fast, so tough and practiced. You never got a chance to see the DMS at its best, but everyone in Baker and Charlie teams were absolutely first-rate. Top-of-the-line combat veterans, not a virgin among them. What is it you Yanks say? Heartbreakers and life-takers? State-of-the-art equipment, cutting-edge tactics, nothing left to chance. And you know what happened? We were slaughtered! Grown men and women torn apart. Civilians killing armed military with their fingers and teeth. Children taking shot after shot to the chest, falling down and then getting right up again, their bodies torn open, and still they kept running at our men, tearing and biting them. Eating them.”
“God,” I whispered.
“God wasn’t there that day,” she hissed in as bitter a voice as I’ve ever heard. “I’m not a religious person, Joe. Faith isn’t something I’m good at, not since I buried Brian; but if there was ever a splinter of belief or hope left in me it ended that day. It was consumed by what happened.”
“Grace… you do know that you and Church had no other choice?”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better? Do you really think that makes any difference to me? I know we didn’t have another choice, that’s why we made the choice we did. We were losing, Joe. Losing. Suddenly, all the training, all the power that we thought we had was gone. It failed us. Just as medicine and prayer failed Brian. All we could do was disconnect another switch, turn off more lives because there was nothing else left for us.” Tears fell steadily but she didn’t bother to wipe them away.
She gave me a twisted smile. “The thing is… that was even worse than turning off my baby’s life support. Worse, do you understand? And afterward do you know what I felt the most? Guilt. Not for having to kill all of those people. No, I felt—I feel—guilty because that was the worst moment of my life. It probably always will be. So I feel like I’ve somehow betrayed or maybe abandoned my baby because now this event is bigger and worse even than that. I feel like I’ve lost Brian again. Forever this time. It hurts so damn—”
Her voice suddenly disintegrated into terrible sobs and she dropped the bottle and covered her face with both hands. I was up and across the room before her bottle rolled to a stop. I took her by the arms and gathered her to me, pulling her off the chair, wrapping her up against my chest. The sound of her sobs cut through my flesh and into my heart. I held her close—this angry woman, this bitter soldier—and I kissed her hair and held her as close and as tight and as safe as I could.
SHE WEPT FOR a long time.
I walked her to the bed and we lay down together, her face buried against me, her tears soaking through my T-shirt, her body fever-hot. Maybe I said something, some nonsense words, but I don’t remember. Her body bucked and spasmed with the tears until slowly, slowly, the immediacy of the storm began to pass. Her arms were wrapped around me, her fingers knotted in my shirt. The knots of tension eased by very slow degrees.
We lay like that for a long time, and then I could feel the change in her as her tension changed from the totality of grief to the awkwardness of awareness. We were as physically close as lovers, but there had been nothing even remotely sexual about her tears or my holding her, not even in our lying down together. Not at first. But now there was a new tension as we both became enormously aware of all the points of contact—of thighs intertwined, of groins pushed forward, of her breasts against my chest, of hot exhalations, and of animal heat and natural musk.
There was a moment when we should have rolled apart, made a few awkward jokes, and retreated to separate corners of the universe. But that moment passed.
After a minute or two she said, very softly, “I didn’t come here for this.”
“I know.”
“It’s… well, there was no one else. I can’t talk to Mr. Church. Not about this. Not like this.”
“No.”
“And I don’t know Dr. Sanchez yet. Not well enough.”
“You don’t know me, either.”
“Yes,” she said quietly, her forehead tucked under my chin. “I do. I know about Helen. I know about your mum. You’ve lost so much. As much as I have.”
I nodded, she could feel it.
“Will you make love to me?” she asked.
I leaned back and looked down at her. “Not now,” I said. When I saw the hurt on her face I smiled and shook my head. “You’ve chugged two beers, you’re grieving, exhausted, and in shock. I’d have to be the world’s biggest jackass to try and take advantage of that kind of vulnerability.”
Grace looked at me for a long time. “You’re a strange man, Joe Ledger.” She pushed one of her hands up between us and touched my face. “I never thought you’d be kind. Not to me. You’re an actual gentleman.”
“We’re a dying breed… they’re hunting us down one by one.”
She laughed and then laid her head against me. “Thanks for listening, Joe.”
After another long time of silence she said, “Back at the plant I asked you a question, about whether we’ve stopped this. Was that the last cell? Did we stop the terrorist movement here in the States, or did we just burn up our last lead?”
“Bad questions to ask in the dark,” I said, stroking her hair.
“Mr. Church spoke with the President and the head of the FDA. The gears are already turning to get the pharmaceutical companies involved. The President will address a closed session of Congress in two days. The full resources of the United States, England, and the other allies will be thrown against this now.”
“Yes.”
“So why am I still so afraid?” she asked.
The silence swirled around us.
“Same reason I am,” I said.
>
She said nothing more and after a long while her breathing changed to the slow, steady rhythm. I kissed her hair and she wriggled more tightly against me, and after a while, she slept. After a much longer time I, too, drifted off.
Chapter Ninety-One
The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Saturday, July 4; 6:01 A.M.
GRACE AND I had a quiet breakfast in the mess hall before first light, then she headed off to muster her team while I made a call. I was hoping I’d wake Church up and get to hear him when he was off balance, but he answered on the first ring. Fricking robot.
Instead of “Hello” he asked, “Is there a problem?”
“No. I wanted to touch base about the Liberty Bell thing. You still cool with me taking Echo Team to Philly?”
“Of course,” he said, and it implied that I’d have heard different if he’d changed his mind. The communication flow with him was going to take some getting used to. I’m used to a lot more bureaucracy. “I advised the President of our concerns with safety during the holiday, and he approved all of my recommendations. The gears are already turning to get the pharmaceutical companies involved. The President will address a closed emergency session of Congress tomorrow. The full resources of the United States, England, and the other allies will be thrown against this now.”
Church briefly outlined the steps he was taking to bulk up security at the top twenty Fourth of July events scheduled across the country. It meant mobilizing tens of thousands of additional police and military, and though that had to be a red-tape nightmare Church seemed confident that it would all be handled. I guess having a rubber stamp from the Commander in Chief lit a lot of fires under the right asses. Points for Church.
“My question,” I said when he’d finished, “is what our actual status is going to be down there in Philly? I mean… we can’t exactly flash DMS badges, can we?”
“We don’t have badges,” he said. “I also discussed this with the President and obtained authorization for Echo Team to roll as a special detachment of the Secret Service. How familiar are you with their protocols?”
“I can fake it.”
“Last night I called a friend in the garment industry and appropriate clothes should be arriving by six-thirty. IDs were already sent by courier and Sergeant Dietrich has them.”
“You don’t like wasting time, do you?”
“No,” he said, and hung up.
I smiled and shook my head. So this is what it felt like to be in the major league.
I found Dietrich and got the material Church had sent. IDs for everyone plus a detailed set of notes from Church that included the names and numbers of the people we planned to interview.
I found Grace in the computer trailer. I told her about my call to Church. “How is it that he has this much power over the President? I mean… who is Church?”
Grace shook her head. “I’ve heard some bits and pieces of things over the last couple of years that add up to his having the goods on a lot of people in Washington.”
“The goods? As in… blackmail?”
“I think he quite literally knows where all of the bodies are buried, as the saying goes. He has leverage on a lot of power players and he uses it to get what he wants.”
“Good thing he’s on our side.” I paused. “He is on our side, isn’t he?”
“God, I hope so.”
“How’d he get all this dirt?”
“I can make a guess,” she said, arching an eyebrow, and then she tilted her head in the direction of the complex array of computer terminals that filled the room.
“MindReader?”
She shrugged. “It makes sense. It’s brilliant at digging into everyone else’s business without leaving a trace that it was there. That’s one of its unique and most dangerous features. With MindReader he can sneak into the Pentagon, read whatever files he wants, and then exit without leaving the usual signature. I’ve seen him do it.”
“Holy smoke.” I stared at the computer as if it was Aladdin’s lamp. “You ever heard the expression, ‘If that were to fall into the wrong hands it’d be curtains for the free world’? Well, that pretty much applies here.”
“Too right it does. There are only a handful of people in the world who have access, and Church has to personally grant us access through his mainframe router to allow us to log on each day. It’s no joke, and even though MindReader doesn’t leave a trace in other computers, all searches and operations are logged on his hard drive.”
“So Big Brother really is watching,” I mused.
“All the time.”
“Does the man ever sleep?”
“God, I’ve never seen him so much as yawn. I think he’s a cyborg.”
“At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me. Maybe there’s something in those vanilla wafers.”
She picked up a printout. “These are the names of the agency directors who have sent staff to the DMS. Nearly half of them will be in Philadelphia today for the Liberty Bell event, either as guests or on the job. Because the First Lady, the Vice President’s wife, the wives of fifty congressmen, and over a hundred members of Congress are all attending the event, it’s a security mishmash. Most of the chiefs will be there to make sure their individual Indians don’t let anyone of importance get scalped.”
“I know, I was originally assigned to the detail. How’s this helping us?”
“The President, at Mr. Church’s urging, has contacted each of these directors to put themselves at our disposal. We can set up meetings, and we can interview them personally.”
“During a major event?” I goggled.
“Well… we’d have to pick our moments,” she conceded.
I was skeptical. “All well and good, but how can we interview them with all of the speeches and rallies going on?”
“The rededication only lasts two hours.”
“Good point,” I said. “Okay, let’s mount up and ride.”
Chapter Ninety-Two
El Mujahid / The Motorways Motel / July 4
THE FIGHTER SAT on the edge of the motel bed in cotton trousers and a tank top that showed off his huge shoulders, bull neck, and the corded muscles of his arms. He had removed his bandage to let his guests inspect his face and the slash mark was a livid red line surrounded by green and purple bruises.
The two men seated on the couch stared at him. Ahmed, Amirah’s brother, was on the left, his face showing concern for his brother-in-law. Next to him was a young black man with wire-framed glasses and a knit kufi on his close-cropped hair. His name was Saleem Mohammad but was born as John Norman twenty-six years ago in West Philadelphia. He was a graduate of Temple University’s MFA theater program where he specialized in stage makeup and costume design. For two years after graduation he worked on and off Broadway, but eighteen months ago he met an African-American mullah who introduced him first to the teachings of Muhammad and, later, to the more radical teachings of El Mujahid. Saleem had been totally captivated and over the months moved smoothly from a study of the Koran to a more specialized study of fundamentalist politics. Years of repressed anger bubbled up and came to a boil when he saw the tapes of El Mujahid’s diatribes on Western interference in Middle East culture and religion. Unlike many of his fellow converts to the faith, Saleem was thoroughly primed to accept the belief that extreme measures were sometimes necessary in order to protect the followers of the one true God. Saleem looked like an artist, which he certainly was, but in his chest beat the heart of a soldier of the Faith.
Sitting there on the couch, he looked very young to El Mujahid, but the Fighter could see familiar fires burning in Saleem’s eyes. It pleased him. The Fighter was amused by the young man, but he also felt proud of him, of his depth of conviction. For nearly an hour they had discussed scriptures and had all prayed together. Now, their prayer mats rolled up, they sat and talked. El Mujahid had taken off his shirt and bandages to let Saleem take a close look.
“Can you do it?” the Fighter asked.
“Yes. W
hat you want is… easy. I mean, there’s nothing to it.” Saleem looked at Ahmed. “I thought you said you wanted me to do something difficult?”
Ahmed shook his head. “I said I wanted you to do something important.”
“It needs to hide everything,” said El Mujahid, “the cut, the bruising.”
Saleem smiled earnestly. “Give me an hour and I can guarantee you that no one will recognize you or see that injury. I have everything I need at my apartment.”
“That’s excellent.”
They agreed on a time for Saleem to return and the young man left, looking a little starstruck at having been in the presence of El Mujahid. One of Ahmed’s agents tailed him surreptitiously though both he and El Mujahid were convinced of Saleem’s dedication to the cause. When he was gone, the Fighter pulled on a shirt and buttoned it up.
“By now Gault knows that I’ve eluded his assassins and that we have the trigger device,” El Mujahid said. “If he was man enough to grow a beard Gault would be pulling it out by now. He must be very confused over what has happened.” He paused. “Where is the shipment from Amirah?”
“Andrea installed it over a week ago, and it is very cleverly hidden. No one will detect it,” Ahmed said, referring to his American girlfriend, a woman he’d converted to their brand of Islam a few years ago. He gestured to a suitcase that he’d brought with him.
“Which version did Amirah send? I tried Generation Seven on a village and it was impressive.”
“Generation Ten.”
“Ten?” gasped the Fighter. “You mean Generation Seven—”
Ahmed grinned and shook his head. “My sister is ambitious and her anger toward the Western Satan is very great. She did not say much in her coded message, but she said that this will sweep America like the breath of God.”
El Mujahid murmured a prayer.
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