“See anything?” she asked.
“Not two-legged and armed.”
“Smart-ass.” In the shadowy trees, she looked at him as a crooked smile of greeting curled up the corners of his mouth. He had a great face, one she had always liked. His high, flat cheekbones and chiseled chin were very male. She pushed that from her mind as she continued to study the road, the woods, the shadows.
Jon said, “We’d better move on back toward Toledo, try to keep ahead of them. And I really do want to know about your face. Please don’t tell me it’s plastic surgery, I’d be devastated.” They trotted off again, alongside each other now on the dark road.
“Hold out your hand.”
“I have a feeling I shouldn’t.” He stuck out his free hand anyway.
She reached inside her upper lip, left side, right side, and removed inserts. She extended her hand, intending to drop them onto his palm.
He yanked his hand away. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
She grinned, unzipped a pocket on her web belt, and slipped them inside. “The wig stays on. It’s bad enough you’re running around in that neon Hawaiian shirt. At least it’s a dark blue. My blond hair would be like a beacon.”
She really was good; she knew how to use very little cosmetic change to great effect. With the inserts, her features had been lumpy and wide, making her eyes seem too close together, and her chin too small. But now her face was the one he remembered. Her wide-set eyes, straight nose, and high forehead radiated a kind of sexy intelligence that he found intriguing, even when she was her usual prickly self.
He was thinking about all that as he watched for the terrorists. He half-expected a truckload of them to roar down the road, a machine gun attached on top, when he heard engines thunder to life behind them from the direction of the farmhouse.
“Hear that?” he asked.
“I’m not deaf.”
The noise changed, and the chop-chop of rotors was added to the booming engines. Soon, from behind them in the direction of the farmhouse, three helicopters rose into the night like the shadows of giant birds, one after the other, their red and green navigational lights blinking as they circled and headed south. Dark, bruised-looking clouds scudded across the sky. The moon peeked out and disappeared, and so did the helicopters.
“We’ve just been abandoned,” she complained. “Damnation!”
“Shouldn’t that be ‘amen’? That was a damn close call for you.”
She bristled. “Maybe, but I’ve been tailing M. Mauritania for two weeks, and now I’ve lost him, and I damn well don’t know who the rest of them were, much less where they’ve gone.”
“They’re an Islamic terrorist group called the Crescent Shield. They’re the ones who bombed the Pasteur Institute, or had it done by a front group to cover their tracks.”
“What front group?”
“The Black Flame.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Not surprising. They’ve been out of action for at least ten years. This operation was their attempt to raise money so they could get back to their game. Tell your people the next time you check in, and they can warn the Spanish authorities. The Black Flame also kidnapped Chambord and his daughter. But it’s the Crescent Shield who’s holding them prisoner, and they have Chambord’s DNA computer, too.”
Randi stopped running as if she had hit a wall. “Chambord’s alive?”
“He was in that farmhouse, so was his daughter.”
“The computer?”
“Not there.”
They resumed moving, this time walking in silence, busy with their own thoughts.
Jon said, “You’re part of the search for the DNA computer?”
“Of course, but peripherally,” Randi told him. “We’ve got people out investigating all known terrorist leaders. I was already surveilling Mauritania, because he’d reemerged from whatever hole he’d been hiding in the last three years. I tailed him from Algiers to Paris. Then the Pasteur was bombed, it looked as if a DNA computer had been stolen, and all of us were put on high alert. But I never saw him make contact with any other known terrorist except that big Fulani, Abu Auda. They’re friends from the old days of Al Qaeda.”
“Just who or what is this Mauritania that he was on the CIA’s to-be-watched list?”
“You’ll hear him called Monsieur Mauritania,” Randi corrected. “It’s a sign of respect, and he insists on it. We think his real name’s Khalid al-Shanquiti, although sometimes he goes by Mahfouz Oud al-Walidi. He was a top lieutenant of Bin Laden but left before Bin Laden moved his people to Afghanistan. Mauritania keeps a damn low profile, almost never shows up on intelligence radar, and tends to operate more in Algeria than anywhere else, when we do spot him. What do you know about this Crescent Shield group?”
“Only what I saw in that farmhouse. They seem to be experienced, well trained, and efficientat least their leaders are. From the number of languages I heard, I’d say they’re from just about every country that has Islamic fundamentalists. Pan-Islamic, and damn well organized.”
“They would be, with Mauritania in charge. Organized and smart.” She turned her X-ray eyes on Smith. “Now let’s talk about you. Clearly you’re part of the hunt for the molecular computer, too, or you wouldn’t have appeared at that farmhouse in the nick of time to save my skin, and know what you know. When I spotted you in Paris, the story Langley told me was you’d flown to Paris to hold poor Marty’s hand. Now”
“Why was the CIA having me watched?”
She snorted. “You know the services spy on each other. You could be an agent working for a foreign power, right? Supposedly you don’t work for CIA, FBI, NSA, or even army intelligence, no matter what anyone says, and the ‘I’m only here for poor Marty’ story is obviously bull. You had me fooled in Paris all right, but not here, so who the hell do you work for?”
Smith feigned indignation. “Marty was almost killed by that bomb, Randi.” Inwardly he cursed Fred Klein and this secret life to which he had agreed. Covert-One was so clandestineblack codethat even Randi, despite all her CIA credentials, could not learn about it. “You know how it is with me,” he continued with a self-deprecating shrug. “I can’t not find out who nearly killed Marty. And we both know that won’t satisfy me. I’ll want to stop them, too. But then again, what else would a real friend do?”
They stopped at the base of a long, low hill and gazed up. It was such a gentle incline that Smith had not even noticed it while he was following Elizondo. But now, for the return trip, the upward slope seemed long and hard. They looked at it as if they could make it go away.
“Nuts,” she told him. “Last time I heard, Marty was in a coma. If he needs you anywhere, it’s in the hospital, bugging the doctors. So give me a break. Once it was personal, like with the Hades virus, because of Sophia. But now? So who do you really work for? What don’t I know that I should?”
They had stood there long enough, he decided. “Come on. Let’s go back. We’ve got to check the farmhouse. If it’s empty, maybe they’ve left something to tell us where they’ve gone. If there’s still someone there, we’d better question them and find out what they know.” He turned around, retracing their steps, and she sighed and caught up. “It’s all about Marty,” he told her. “Really. You’re too suspicious. All that CIA training, I suppose. My grandmother used to warn me to not look for filth in a clean handkerchief. Didn’t your grandmother ever tell you something useful like that?”
She opened her mouth to retort. Instead, she said, “Shhh. Listen.” She cocked her head.
He heard it, toothe low purr of a powerful car engine. But no headlights. They darted off the road and into a grove of olive trees. The sound was coming toward them, down the hill, heading toward the farmhouse. Abruptly, the engine stopped, and all he could hear was something strange, something he could not quite identify.
“What the devil is that?” Randi whispered.
Then he knew. “Rolling car wheels,”, he whispered back. “See it? It’s that black, moving lump on the road. You can almost make it out.”
She understood. “A black car, no headlights, no engine. Coasting down the hill. Crescent Shield?”
“Could be.”
They made quick plans, and Jon darted across the road to an olive tree that stood alone, probably cut off from the little grove when the road was put in.
The vehicle emerged from the dark like a mechanical apparition. It was a large, old-fashioned touring car of the type favored by Nazi officers during World War II. The top was open, and it looked as if it could have glided straight out of an old newsreel. There was only one person inside. Jon held up his Sig Sauer to signal Randi. She nodded back: The Crescent Shield would not have sent one man to attack them.