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“I won’t wait long.”
“Ten minutes.”
Killing the connection, Simmons hauled himself to his feet, wincing as he stood erect. Pain seared his midsection, reminding him of the cancer eating away his insides. The oncologist had diagnosed it earlier that month, declared it inoperable. In the best-case scenario, Simmons had two months to live, perhaps three. Within a month, he guessed, he’d be admitted to a hospice where he could quietly wait to die. Setting his jaw, he walked past the banks of computers, the hurried workers that populated the control center. He kept his face stoic as he went. He’d decided to keep his illness a secret as long as he possibly could. If his superiors knew of its extent, he’d probably be put out to pasture within a matter of days. He could sit on the sidelines and watch as someone else within the Agency oversaw Saddam’s downfall; he could watch as they took the credit.
Like hell.
Glass doors hissed as they parted in front of Simmons. He moved quickly down the corridor, stepped into a secure elevator at the end of the hall and within seconds was silently ascending to another level of the CIA’s sprawling complex.
Slipping off his glasses and squeezing his eyes shut, Simmons rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. As he did, his mind wandered to the Gulf War. He’d led a team of Marines into southern Iraq to pinpoint artillery batteries for coalition bombers. Getting past the ersatz soldiers had been easy enough. Most had looked too scared to wipe their nose let alone take on a group of heavily armed Marines, especially a group backed by the thunder and hellfire of coalition fighter jets. Within an hour the group had reached the batteries and prepared to pinpoint them with handheld laser-targeting instruments.
After that, it all had gone to hell. A Republican Guard unit had caught them on their rear flank, taking out two Marines before the American fighters could respond in kind, cutting down the Iraqi soldiers in an unrelenting storm of gunfire. Sixteen Iraqi soldiers had died in the encounter, two Marines. It had been two too many, as far as Simmons was concerned.
He clenched his jaw. Simmons had never lost a man in the field, ever. After that night, war had become intensely personal.
Stepping from the elevator, he walked down a corridor, following it as it jogged left then right. He passed through another pair of bulletproof glass doors, into a control room similar to the one he’d left behind downstairs. After the requisite security checks, he crossed the room and slipped into another, smaller room where several men and women in business suits sat at a large mahogany table with polished brass inlaid trim.
Simmons ignored the other six and focused on a big bear of a man seated at the head of the table. CIA director James Lee returned the stare.
“Good news, David?”
“No, sir.”
“Tell me what’s wrong. And for God’s sake, pull the rod out of your ass and stand like a normal person.”
It was only then that Simmons realized he stood at attention, legs and back bolt upright, arms and hands stabbing toward the floor. Old training died hard, he thought. And he’d caught himself in more than one stressful moment falling back on the order and discipline of the military.
“It’s the operation, sir. We need to talk.”
He paused while Lee dismissed the others in the room.
“Sit down, David.”
“I prefer to stand, sir.”
“Fine. Just tell me what’s wrong.”
“You told me to inform you of any irregularities, right?”
A worried look passed over Lee’s features. Leaning forward in his chair, he rested his elbows on the table and stared intently at Simmons. “Yes. Yes, I did.”
“One of the informants failed to make a rendezvous.”
“His whereabouts?”
“Unknown.”
“So we may have been compromised?” Lee asked.
Simmons shrugged. “It’s possible. But I can’t say that with certainty.”
Looking up from the table, Lee met Simmons’s gaze. “Well, what can you say with certainty?”
“That the informant missed the rendezvous.”
“You already told me that. But what the hell does it mean?”
“Hard to say. The guy might have gotten cold feet. He might be waiting at his girlfriend’s house, hoping the whole thing just blows over. It’s hard to find people in Iraq willing to cross Saddam.”
“Can we track him down?’
Simmons shook his head. “Not a good idea. If we make too big a stink, we raise everyone’s suspicions. Whole thing goes to hell after that.”
“Well, give me something I can work with here. Can we accomplish this mission without him?”
“Possibly. He had the itinerary information. He could place Saddam within a five-minute window. Without that, we may have to expose ourselves for longer periods, probably forty-five minutes to an hour.”
“What’s your comfort level with this?”
Simmons pondered this for a moment. In an operation such as this, with a paranoid target like Hussein, any deviation from the plan was cause for alarm. “Stone, Archer and Doyle are three of our best operatives. They adapt quickly to adversity. We’ve been training the Iraqis for six months. They’re good to go.”
Lee’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’m comfortable. As long as my men get the air support they need, they can pull off this mission.”
Lee leaned back in his chair. Lacing his fingers together into a double fist, he stared at his thumbnails, as though lost in thought.
“You bearing a grudge?”
“Sir?”
“I know about the op in ’91. You lost men, good ones. Is that clouding your judgment?”
Anger colored Simmons face and heated the skin of his shoulders and arms. His hands clenched into fists. Lee’s bluntness took him by surprise. “Of course not. I won’t put my men in harm’s way just to settle a score.”
Lee came to his full six-foot, four-inch height and stared down at Simmons. “You’re right,” he said. “You won’t.”
A lurch that had nothing to do with the cancer passed through Simmons’s belly. “Excuse me?”
“No mission. Not tonight, anyway. My orders from the President were explicit—a surgical strike. Quick and deadly. No hint of American involvement in this, period. The Middle East is a goddamn tinderbox as it is. We don’t need to put a blow torch to it by creating another Bay of Pigs. My gut says to abort the mission. If you were using your damn head, you’d see the same thing.”
“Sir—”
“I want those people out of there. Tonight. End of conversation. Don’t get greedy. You’ll have plenty of other opportunities to plug this bastard before retirement rolls around.”
“Jim—”
Lee held up a hand to silence Simmons. “Make the call. I want our people out of Iraq within twelve hours. If you hand me a problem, I’ll hand you back more trouble than you can handle.”
Squelching an impulse to punch Lee in the solar plexus, Simmons snapped ramrod-straight to attention and fixed his gaze on an invisible spot on the wall. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“I knew I could count on you, David.”
From his peripheral vision, Simmons saw Lee smile and more rage bubbled up from within.
Lee ignored his subordinate. Hooking his jacket with two fingers, he hefted the garment and slung it over a narrow shoulder. A moment later he was gone and Simmons was alone, numb.
His stomach burning as he exited the meeting room, Simmons reached into his shirt pocket and extracted two painkillers. He’d been warned not to exceed the dose, that it might impair his coordination, his judgment. So what? According to Lee, his judgment was already flawed and Simmons’s body hurt like hell.
Returning to his own command center, Simmons considered Lee’s words. Lee was a flaming jerk, but he made a good point. A botched coup attempt in Iraq only would solidify support for Saddam Hussein, make him a sympathetic figure on the Arab street. And the coup’s backer, America, would walk away with egg on its face, a superpower unable to topple a two-bit dictator.
You’ll have plenty of other opportunities to plug this bastard before retirement rolls around.
Smug bastard. Lee had no idea what it was like to face death, to feel your heart slam so fast, so hard, that it felt as though it might explode at any moment. He pushed paper all day, moved agents and paramilitary operatives around like chess pieces on the board, one eye on his strategic plan, the other on the next promotion. Not all CIA directors had been that way, but this guy was and Simmons hated him for it.
He picked up the satellite phone and set it in his lap. With the diagnosis of cancer, he thought constantly about death, realized he’d leave nothing behind. His career had been heroic, but shrouded in secrecy and bereft of recognition. His ex-wives hated him and had trained his daughters accordingly. He’d lost contact with most of his military buddies, and only occasionally socialized with the other CIA employees outside of work.
During the last decade or so, the closest thing he had to family had been his Force Recon team. Those men had admired and trusted him, following him into hell time and again. He’d repaid them with death, leading them into a deadly mission and returning home with a handful of survivors.
“Sir, are you okay?”
Simmons looked up and saw a young woman, her amber hair pulled into a ponytail, a wireless headset wrapped around her head. She was one of six technicians and intelligence analysts in the room.
He waved her away. “I’m fine, Dana. Head just feels a little light, is all.”
“If I may say so, you look tired, a bit pale.”
“I said, I’m fine. Dammit, leave me alone.”
The volume of his voice surprised him. The woman stiffened, jerked back a bit as though burned, her pretty features hardening into a cold stare.
“Yes, sir. Jon Stone called two minutes ago, just before you returned.”
“I’ll deal with Stone.”
In his mind, his voice dripped with disdain, like venom trickling the length of a cobra’s fang. Stone was an undisciplined killer, a wild cannon. Maybe he dazzled the brass with his dual master’s degrees and his record of successful missions. Simmons knew better. He knew that every time Stone walked into a mission, he drew innocent blood. Women. Children. Stone cared little as long as he got results. Same went for his buddy, Stephen Archer.
If Simmons’s voice betrayed his hatred, the woman in front of him showed no signs of it. And what if she did? To hell with her and everyone else. Simmons was dying. And the way he saw it, a dying man ought to be able to say whatever the hell he wants.
“Sir, did you hear what it I said?”
The room came back into focus for a moment. “Huh?”
“They lost contact with Doyle, sir. He was supposed to check in with Stone and they lost contact with him.”
Simmons sat upright in his chair. Doyle not checking in? Something about that bothered him, though he couldn’t place what. Why was it so damn hard to think?
“Get out.”
“Sir?”
“Get out. All of you. I need to speak with Stone.”
The analysts and technicians filed from the room, leaving Simmons alone.
Raising the satellite phone, he began to punch in Stone’s code. Knowing he might need to dial it at a critical moment, he’d burned the code into his memory, doing so until he could recite it in his sleep. Still, he had trouble bringing the numbers on the keypad into focus. They blinked and blurred as he tried to pin them down under his index finger.
Finishing the number sequence, he leaned back in his chair, waited for Stone to pick up.
The agent’s voice sounded far away, angry in Simmons’s ear.
“Where the hell you been, man?”
“Do it,” Simmons said.
“What?”
“You heard me. Lee says it’s a go. So, go”
IHMAD JUMA STEPPED from the room and wrinkled his nose, a vain attempt to expel the stenches of vomit, blood and human excrement that clung inside his nostrils. He shut the door behind him, hoping to seal behind it the memory of an old friend who still lay inside, mangled and dying.
Correction: an old friend who had turned traitor. That made the man an enemy, and his impending death a cause for celebration. Perhaps if Juma told himself that long enough, eventually he’d believe it.
Juma moved with clipped, precise strides that belied his twenty years as an Iraqi military officer. As he continued down the hall, he realized the air felt irritatingly cool against his forehead and armpits. He extracted a handkerchief from his fatigue pants. Wiping the cloth over his forehead, he traced the edge of his severe widow’s peak and scrubbed away the sheen of perspiration that lay below it.
The screams and pleadings of Brahim Azar echoed in his mind, as unrelenting as the desert sun. He shook his head violently to shoo them away, then caught himself and looked around self-consciously. None of the passing soldiers seemed to notice his momentary distress, eliciting a silent prayer of gratitude. He’d witnessed more tortures, beatings, rapes than he could recall. The memories of these events flashed past his mind’s eye like a high-speed kaleidoscope, one blurring into the next with almost blinding speed. Years ago the images had disturbed him, yanking him from sleep, prompting violent outbursts against his family. But now he prided himself on his aloofness in the face of others’ agony.
Still something about watching an old friend suffer had disturbed him deeply, wrenching his guts and searing his soul with the unwelcome fires of guilt, self-hatred.
Several minutes later he stood in front of the great leader, in one of the man’s numerous private offices. Silence and cigar smoke hung heavily in the air, the latter stinging Juma’s eyes. His stomach continued churning, this time because of nerves. He’d been close to the leader many, many times, but never the focus of the meeting. The news was grim, and Juma couldn’t help but wonder whether delivering it might cost him his life.
The great leader sat in a high-backed chair, facing a wall. Waiting for an invitation to speak, Juma eyed his surroundings. Bookcases lined the walls, ornate brass lamps shone brightly and a television carrying Iraqi state news reports blinked in the background.
“You bring me information?”
“Yes, sir. Of utmost importance.”
“Speak.”
“A small group of men, including some within the government, have conspired to kill you. They planned to do it tonight.”
“Who are these men?”
“I have their names here, sir.” Juma pulled a manila folder from under his left arm and handed it to one of the guards, who, in turn, set in on the great leader’s desk. “They planned to kill you tonight at the royal palace. Tariq Riyadh is among them.”
“The Americans?”
“The infidels also are part of the plan, yes. They have operatives within the country, all of them posing as foreign journalists, even as we speak. As for our own countrymen, I have dispatched teams to hunt them down, arrest them.”
