Dr. Chambord spoke with disdain: “I’m not with them, Colonel Smith, they’re with me.”
“Father?” Theacute;regrave;se questioned, her face full of disbelief.
But before Chambord could respond, Abu Auda, three of his men, and Mauritania appeared on the run. Jon raised his weapon and grabbed Theacute;regrave;se’s from his belt.
Randi checked her watch. Four minutes. Suddenly there was noise from the building. Shouts and running feet. She held her breath as shots rang out, followed by a burst of automatic fire. Jon and Theacute;regrave;se had no automatic weapons. She was afraid to think, but there was only one possibility: Jon and the Chambords had somehow been discovered. She shook her head, denying it, as two more bursts of automatic fire spit noisily in the distance.
She leaped to her feet and tore across the grounds toward the villa. Then came another awful sound: From inside, she could hear triumphant laughter. Shouts of victory, praising Allah. The infidels were dead!
She froze. Unable to think, to feel. It could not be. But all of the gunfire after the two initial early single shots had been automatic. They had killed Jon and Theacute;regrave;se.
A great sorrow washed over her, and then a towering rage. She told herself sternly she had no time for either. It was all about the DNA computer. That it must not remain in the terrorists’ handshellip;. Too much was at stake. Too many other lives.
She turned on her heel and ran away from the villa, racing as if all of the hounds of hell were pursuing. Trying not to see Jon’s face, the dark blue eyes, the laughter, the outrage, all of the intelligence. His handsome face with the high, flat cheekbones. How his jaw would knot when he was angry
When the missile landed, the explosion threw her forward ten feet. The percussive blast was thunderous all around her head and inside it and a windy heat at her back. It was almost as if she had been hurled away by an angry demon. As debris shot through the air and fell in a dangerous rain, she crawled under the branches of an olive tree and covered her head with her arms.
Randi sat with her back to the perimeter wall, watching red and yellow flames lick up toward the dark sky from where the white villa had stood nearly a mile away. She spoke into the radio. “Call the Pentagon. The DNA computer is destroyed, and Dr. Chambord with it. There’s no more danger.”
“Roger, Agent Russell. Good work.”
Her voice was dull. “Also tell them Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Smith, M.D., U.S. Army, died in the explosion, as well as Dr. Chambord’s daughter, Theacute;regrave;se. Then get me out.”
She switched off the transmitter and gazed up at the slowly moving clouds. The moon peeked out, a silver orb, and then it was gone. The stink of death and burning debris filled the air. She thought about Jon. He had taken a chance and known the risk. It had come out against him, but he would not complain. Then she began to cry.
PART THREE
Chapter Twenty-eight
Beirut, Lebanon
CIA agent Jeff Moussad moved warily through the rubble of South Beirut, an officially denied area. The air was dusty, and the mountains of brick and mortar on either side reflected the sad story of the long civil war that had torn apart Lebanon and destroyed Beirut’s reputation as the Paris of the East. Although the downtown heart of the city was rebuilding, and several hundred international firms had returned, little progress was in evidence here in this largely lawless no-man’s-land of the grim past.
Jeff was armed and in disguise, on assignment to contact an important asset, whose identity and location had been discovered in the notes of a fellow CIA agent who had died in the infamous attack on the Pentagon of September 11. His difficult missionakin to finding a needle in a silo of needleswas largely possible because of new sources of intelligence that the U.S. government had been developing in everything from familiar tools like the U-2 spy planes and the constellation of secret spy satellites orbiting overhead, to commercial satellite photos and remote-controlled spy drones.
Since there were no road markers, Jeff was relying on a specially programmed Palm Pilot to find his way to the right cave carved into the debris of what had once been some kind of building. He paused in dark shadow to check the Palm Pilot again. The viewing screen showed the streets and alleys of this section in live video relayed from one of a new family of pilotless aerial drones. Those upgraded, unmanned aircraft provided real-time images of an area over vast distances through satellite communications. This was a major improvement from when a drone could provide up-to-the-minute intelligence only if a radio signal could be beamed directly back to the base from where it took off.
Because of the changing geographical chaos here in South Beirut, a stranger would be easily confused. But with the live video feed and the directional lines that told exactly which turns to make, Jeff followed a sure path for perhaps a quarter of a mile. But then gunfire exploded nearby, followed by footsteps behind him. His pulse accelerated, and he darted quickly into the shadow of a smoke-blackened tank that had been twisted and burned in some long-ago firefight. Straining to hear, he pulled out his pistol. He needed to get to the asset’s lair quickly, before he was discovered.
He checked his Palm Pilot. His destination was not much farther. But as he studied the next turn, the unthinkable happened. The Palm Pilot went dark. He stared at it, stunned, his chest tight. He had no idea where he was. Cursing under his breath, knowing he was lost, he hit buttons, and the usual fake information that he carried in the Palm Pilot appearedphone numbers, appointments. But there was no communication from the drone to tell him where to go later, or how to return to base. The connection had died.
Frantically, he tried to remember the exact location of the next turn. When he was sure he remembered correctly, he moved on past a collapsed building, rounded the corner, and crossed toward what he hoped was his final destination. As he emerged onto a leveled area, he looked nervously for the cave entrance. He never found it. What he did see was the muzzle flashes of four assault rifleshellip;and nothing more.
Fort Belvoir, Virginia
Just south of Washington, D.C., stood historic Fort Belvoir, now a state-of-the-art site for some one hundred tenant organizationsa Who’s Who of the Department of Defense. Among its most clandestine residents was the main receiving station for satellite information for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Created in 1960 to design, launch, and operate U.S. spy satellites, the NRO was so highly secret that it was not even officially acknowledged until the 1990s. Large and powerful, the NRO’s multibillion-dollar annual budget exceeded the yearly spending of any of the nation’s three most powerful espionage kingdomsthe CIA, the FBI, and the NSA.
Here in the rolling hills of suburban Virginia, the NRO’s information-receiving station was a hotbed of cutting-edge electronics and analytical manpower. One of the civilian analysts was Donna Lindhorst, raven-haired, freckle-faced, and exhausted from the last six days of being on high alert. Today she was monitoring a missile-launch facility in North Korea, a country that was not only considered a serious potential threat to the United States and its allies, but one that had made development of longer-range missiles a high priority.
A longtime NRO employee, Donna knew that spy satellites had roamed the skies for some forty years, many orbiting a hundred miles above the planet. Traveling at mach 25, these billion-dollar birds flew over every spot on the face of the Earth twice a day, taking digital snapshots of places that the CIA, government policymakers, and the military-high command wanted to see. At any one time, at least five were overhead. From civil war in the Sudan to environmental disasters in China, America’s satellites provided a steady river of black-and-white images.
The missile-launch facility in North Korea that Donna was studying was high-danger priority right now. All the United States needed was for some rogue nation to take advantage of the current uncertain electronic situation. And that was what might be happening right now. Donna’s throat was dry with fear, because the images she was monitoring indicated a heat plume like those emitted by rocket launches.
She studied the screen nervously, cuing the satellite to focus on the area longer. Known in the spy trade as an Advanced Keyhole-class satellite, it could take a photo every five seconds and relay it almost instantly through Milstar satellites to her monitor. This placed enormous demands on data relay and image processing, but she had to know whether that plume was real. If it were, it could be an early warning of a missile attack.