by Alex Lukeman
"They are different worlds. Jerusalem puts on a face of diversity but it's a time bomb. Jews, Christians and Arabs are all crammed into sections of the city side by side. They don't like each other."
"Religion doesn't have much to do with reason."
"That's the problem."
"You're not religious?"
"I love my religion, but I'm what they call a secular Jew. The Orthodox disapprove of people like me. Those kinds of divisions in Israel make it hard to get any real consensus."
"Like peace with the Palestinians."
"Like that." She nodded and dipped a tuna roll into soy sauce. "It's an impossible situation. Too much blood's been spilled. There's too much anger."
"You sound like Ari." He poured another cup of sake. It was good, light and dry, not too sweet.
"Ari's right. All that's likely to come out of this trip by your President is trouble."
Carter looked at his watch and signaled for the check.
They walked out to the lobby and the elevator.
"I'd better ride up with you," she said. They got out on the fifth floor and walked along the deserted corridor. At Carter's door, he stopped short. He held up his damaged hand and slipped his pistol out. The tell-tale he'd placed on the door was out of place. Rivka drew her pistol. She held it pointed toward the ceiling in both hands.
Maid service? She mouthed the words. Nick shook his head, pointed at the Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the handle.
He took the plastic room key out of his pocket, stepped to the side of the door and inserted it into the slot. A green light came on with a loud click. The lock released. He pushed the handle down. Like most modern hotel doors, it was designed to close by itself. No way to throw the door open and have it stay that way.
Maybe this was nothing. Maybe the maid had come in and left chocolates on the pillow.
He pushed the door in hard and went in fast and low, gun held out in front. The room was dark. The glass balcony doors were halfway open. He'd left them closed. Across the way, the illuminated fortress walls of the Old City crowned the ancient hills. A cool desert breeze bearing the clean smell of Jerusalem pine and fading heat came in from the terrace.
To the right, the bathroom door was open. There was no one inside. A short wall blocked the part of the main room with the bed. Rivka was right behind him, silhouetted against the hallway lights outside the room.
A black figure appeared on the terrace and fired. His gun spit hard, raw coughs and bright flashes from the muzzle. Nick fired three quick shots. Blooms of light lit the room as he pulled the trigger. Rivka's pistol barked next to him, crisp, flat explosions.
The glass doors to the terrace disintegrated. The bullets drove the shooter back over the balcony railing. His scream lasted past all five floors to the courtyard below. It stopped suddenly with a sound like someone dropping a sack of wet cement.
Rivka went down to her knees and folded forward onto the carpet. There was a bloody hole on her back.
She moaned, her face contorted with pain. Nick grabbed towels from the bathroom and pressed them against the wound. The bleeding slowed.
"You're okay, you're okay. Don't move. I've got the bleeding stopped."
Rivka was chalk white, clenching her jaw.
"You got him, he went over the balcony. The bullet missed your lung. Don't worry."
Nick was pumped from the adrenaline and he was angry. He'd blown it. He should have made sure she stayed outside. He told himself Rivka was an experienced agent who knew the drill. It didn't make him feel any better.
Running footsteps and shouts in the hall told him they'd have help soon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The safe house sat back from the road on ten acres of rolling Virginia countryside, shielded by a spread of giant oaks planted fifty years before the first shots fired in the Civil War.
The house was a classic ante-bellum southern home, two stories of weathered brick with a slate roof, paned windows and a wide chimney rising at each end. A railed gallery painted white ran along the second story and formed a columned porch along the front of the house. The gallery looked out over fields where Bobby Lee's boys in butternut and gray had passed in a vanished time. A low wall of fieldstone marked the boundaries of the property. Signs warned trespassers away.
The trees and landscaping hid cameras and sensors. It would take a rocket propelled grenade to get through the innocent looking front door. The windows were authentic in style, but they were made of bullet proof glass.
Elizabeth believed that a safe house needed to be safe. There was even an emergency escape tunnel. Maybe it was overkill, but it was satisfying to anyone with reason to be cautious or paranoid.
Elizabeth's paranoia was in full bloom.
Stephanie had hacked into NSA and was probing for anything to hint at what was going on in Dysart's mind. The security monitors on the wall above her in the darkened room showed nothing except serene countryside straight from a realtor's dream book. The ground alarms were active and silent.
Ronnie and Selena were in the kitchen cooking up spaghetti and meatballs. Except for the weapons on the kitchen table it could have passed for a normal dinner hour in America.
Elizabeth's white silk blouse was limp, stained with dark rings under her armpits. She wrinkled her nose at the sour smell of her own stress. Stephanie's fingers moved across the keyboard, entering a steady stream of commands.
Elizabeth began coughing, trying to catch her breath. Sharp pain spread through her chest. Not now!
"Are you all right, Director?"
"Yes." She coughed. "Excuse me. I'll be right back."
She got to her feet and went into the bathroom and closed the door. Coughing, she reached into her purse for a small black case. She opened it and took out a syringe and glass vial. She fitted a needle, punched through the rubber seal on the bottle and drew 5cc of clear liquid into the syringe. Her fine, thin boned hands trembled. She pushed air out of the syringe, sat on the toilet, exposed her thigh and injected the liquid.
She waited for the symptoms to pass. In a moment, she began to feel better. She found the inhaler in her purse and took a deep breath into her lungs.
The doctors had said the attacks would come more often, but she hadn't expected it so soon. She looked in the mirror, at the dark shadows under her eyes. She flushed the unused toilet, patted water on her face and went back to the computer room.
"What have you got, Steph?"
Lines of code streamed across the monitor. Stephanie's fingers flew over the keyboard. "I'm into the main servers and past the firewalls. Now I'm after Dysart's emails. He's got sophisticated encryption, something I haven't seen before, but I think I'm close."
"Will anyone know if you get in?"
"Yes. But they won't know who did it or where it came from. I won't have much time once I crack it, but I'll download everything as fast as possible. We should get most of it before the system shuts me out."
The screen cleared and a list of files appeared.
"I'm in!"
Stephanie tapped a key. A window appeared with a moving bar marking progress of the download. Elizabeth watched. Ten per cent downloaded. Fifteen. Twenty-five. She realized she was holding her breath, exhaled. Fifty-six per cent. Seventy. Seventy-eight. Ninety-three. The screen went blank. Stephanie tapped a key, disconnected.
"We got almost all of it. Right now they're going nuts over at Fort Meade, but there's no way they can trace it back here. It will look like someone in Uzbekistan was playing games."
Ronnie called from the kitchen. "Chow's up! Come eat."
Elizabeth's stomach growled. Dysart's files could wait another ten minutes. As she sat down her phone signaled a call from Nick. She turned on the speaker.
"Director, what the hell's going on?"
"General Dysart took over NSA this morning. He knew you were in Jerusalem and wanted me to recall you. He's not supposed to know you're there. Nobody is. Then someone bugged our vehicles, high t
ech. Our security is compromised. I don't know what's happening, but it smells rotten. We're all at the safe house."
"Someone came after me again. Twice. The first time it was a couple posing as tourists. They're dead. Then someone tried when I went to my hotel room. He's dead too, but he got one of Shin Bet's agents. She's in bad shape."
She? In his hotel room? Who was Nick hanging out with? Selena felt flushed, then guilty. Someone tried to kill him and you're jealous. What's the matter with you?
"Are you all right?" Harker said.
"Yes."
"Nick, I think Dysart is setting up the President. Maybe an assassination."
"The Director of NSA? Are you serious?" Nick's voice faded in and out. It sounded like someone talking from the bottom of a well filled with electronic gargling, but Selena could hear the shock in his voice.
"Yes."
"Can you prove it?"
"Not yet, but my gut tells me I'm right. I want you to get close to Rice. I'll call him and set it up."
Elizabeth looked at her spaghetti cooling on the table. Ronnie wasn't waiting. He twirled pasta on his plate with his fork while he listened to the conversation.
"Arslanian had a flash drive in his hand when he was killed," Nick said. "I'm going to upload it to you now."
Elizabeth watched the download progress on her phone until it was done.
"Got it."
"Director, I'm blown. I should get out of here."
"Rice needs you there. Tell him there may be a plot to assassinate him and that I'm working on proving it."
"I don't like it." He paused. "When will you call Rice?"
"Now. As soon as this conversation is over."
"Then I'm gone." Nick broke the connection.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Elizabeth sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, watching Selena load the dishwasher. Something was bothering her, and it wasn't whether the forks should point up or down. Ronnie and Stephanie were in the computer room. Selena closed the appliance door. The machine began to cycle.
"Tell me about you and Nick," Elizabeth said.
Selena brushed hair away from her forehead. "What about Nick?"
"How serious are you?"
"That's the second time someone's asked me. Ronnie wanted to know."
"Does it bother you that I ask?"
Selena didn't answer.
"Because it's important. I have to know that whatever there is between you isn't going to get in the way."
"In the way?"
"Of what we do. Of what Nick has to do. Of what you have to do. Don't misunderstand me. You've been fine and I'm thrilled you're part of the team. I just need to know emotions aren't going to affect your judgment."
Selena sat down and sighed. "I don't know what to tell you. You asked how serious it is. He's the first man I've met in a long time that doesn't run the other way because he thinks I'm smarter than he is or too independent. So, yes, it's serious enough that I want to give it a shot. Is that what you want to know?"
"Part of it."
Selena got up, got coffee, sat down again.
"Can I talk to you as a friend, instead of a boss?"
Elizabeth looked at her. "Of course you can."
"I can handle the emotional part. What I'm having trouble with isn't Nick." She paused. "My uncle was the only family I had. When he was killed, I felt lost. Alone."
Elizabeth nodded.
"Since then everything's changed. You and Ronnie and Steph and Nick, you're my family now. Except we all carry guns and now the good guys may turn out to be bad guys. It's all upside down. People keep trying to kill my lover. I'm staying in a house with bullet proof windows. I don't know what's happening, I'm not in control and I can't do anything except react. It's making me crazy."
"It does take some getting used to," Elizabeth said. The way she said it made Selena laugh.
"Do you ever get used to it?"
"Sort of."
"I feel...vulnerable. If something happens to Nick, or any of us. I'm not sure how I'd handle that."
"That's honest, what you just said. I used the wrong word, earlier. It's not about emotions, it's about feelings. You have them, you deal with them, you keep going. You take it as it comes. You'll handle it, I'm sure, no matter what. You did that in Tibet. I made the right choice when I let you on the team."
"How do you handle it?"
"I compartmentalize. One thing at a time, more or less. If you think about everything at once it can overwhelm you. I don't let personal feelings get in the way."
"Yes, but you have them."
"Sure. But I've learned to put them away. So has Nick. So has Ronnie. And so have you."
"What do you mean?"
"How did you feel in Tibet? You killed people."
The words hung like a bright neon sign in the air between them. Selena said nothing.
"We see the worst side of things," Elizabeth said. "We never know what's going to happen and we have to keep a clear head"
"I can't pretend I don't have feelings. About Nick."
"I know. But if they get in the way you could make a mistake. It could kill you. Or Nick. There is something that balances things out a little."
Selena looked at Elizabeth.
"We can trust each other and channel our feelings into that. It's what makes any team work."
"Who else do we trust?"
"No one."
"That's cynical."
"That's reality."
"What keeps you doing this?" Selena asked.
Elizabeth thought about it. "I think everyone deserves a chance at some kind of justice. The people we go after don't believe that. Somebody's got to try and stop them."
Selena looked away, out the kitchen window. It was night. There wasn't much to see.
"I wonder what Nick's doing now?" she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
People milled about in the corridor. Nick watched a medical team load Rivka onto a gurney. They'd given her a shot of something and she was out of it, her dusky skin the color of milk. He called Ari.
"Is she all right?"
"She's badly wounded. The medics are here, she's on her way to Hadassah."
"How did it happen?"
"We went through the door of my room and someone started shooting from the balcony. We fired and he went over the edge. She took one all the way through."
"You?"
"He missed." Nick thought of Rivka taking a bullet meant for him. It wasn't a good thought.
"Stay where you are," Ari said. "I'll be there in ten minutes."
Down the hall, three men and a woman in dark suits and earpieces made their way toward him.
"I may not be here. I see Secret Service coming. They're going to want some answers."
"Ten minutes." Ari hung up.
The four agents stopped in front of Nick. They didn't look friendly.
The lead man was over six feet tall and purposeful, with a face that had serious all over it. His eyes were like ice. He was around forty, clean-shaven even this late in the day. He had a high forehead and a combination of green eyes and red hair that said Ireland in the background somewhere.
"You're Carter?"
It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to know who he was. They'd only needed to check the hotel register.
"Yes."
"Calloway." He flashed his ID and gave a pointed look at Nick's holstered H-K. "Hand over your weapon, please."
The other agents waited to see what he would do. The hallway was filling up with police, Secret Service, spies and who knew what. It reminded him of a scene from a Bogart movie. The only thing missing was Sydney Greenstreet.
A large Israeli police officer wearing the insignia of a Sergeant Major stepped in front of Calloway.
"Just a minute. We are in charge, here." His English was heavily accented. He turned to Nick, said, "Give me your pistol, please." He had his right hand on his holstered weapon, the strap snapped back and the hammer cocked,
his left hand held out for the gun.
Agent Calloway was cool before, but now he turned glacial. "The President's security takes precedence here. This man will come with us."
"I don't think so. You are on Israeli sovereign territory. This is our country, not yours. Your President is upstairs and quite safe. This man is in our custody." He turned back to Nick. "Your weapon, please."
Nick carefully lifted his .45 out of the holster, using a thumb and one finger on the grip, and held it out to the Israeli. He took it, nodded once in satisfaction. Calloway's expression looked like he'd been forced to drink vinegar.
The agents crowded in and the tension level in the hall went up. Several Israeli policemen moved closer. Then a commanding voice cut through the noise in the hall.
"That's enough!"
President James Rice was coming down the corridor, thirty feet away. He wore tan slippers and an unbuttoned gray cardigan vest over a blue shirt and casual slacks. Three more grim faced agents were with him. Calloway straightened. All sound died away. Down the hall, a woman in a pink robe and hair curlers peered out of her room.
The President had the kind of presence people expect of the single most powerful politician in the world. With Rice, it was more than political practice. He radiated command and confidence. An intense energy belied his sixty-seven years. He was just under six feet tall, with silver hair still showing a few strands of black. His penetrating, hazel eyes didn't miss anything.
Calloway stepped forward. "Mr. President. Sir, you shouldn't be here."
"It's all right, John, I know who this man is. He is not a threat."
Rice looked at Nick. "A short time ago I received a phone call from Director Harker. When I heard what happened down here, I decided to see for myself."
The President was known for hands-on involvement with anything he deemed important. It drove his advisors and his security details crazy.
"Mr. President," Nick said. "Sir, if I could have a few moments, I need to speak with you."
"All in good time, Carter, all in good time. Sergeant." He nodded at the police officer. "It is Sergeant, isn't it? Please return Mr. Carter's weapon to him."