Джеймс Паттерсон - Killer Instinct

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“You do have a way of pissing people off, Reinhart.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I said.

Foxx closed his eyes for a catnap, and in the silence that ensued, my thoughts turned to Tracy and Annabelle, and the mess I’d made of our family. I couldn’t help it. As if things couldn’t get any worse, they now didn’t have an apartment to come home to—assuming they were ever coming home again. The idea that I had to call Tracy and warn him to stay away from the city was the ultimate irony. All I wanted was for him and Annabelle to come back. Even if Tracy wanted to, they couldn’t.

Twenty minutes later, in the basement of the Agency’s safe house, I set the alarm on my phone for four hours later. Turned out, I didn’t need to.

After only two hours of sleep, Foxx woke me up.

“We have a problem,” he said.

Chapter 90

FOXX DIDN’T bury the lede. He knew no other way.

“Your dinner with Sadira Yavari tonight? It’s off,” he said.

My first question would’ve been why were it not for what Foxx was holding in his hand.

“What’s in the file?” I asked.

“Nothing I can show you,” he answered.

I figured as much. I’ve always admired the almost comical paradox of US intelligence agencies. Everything has a code name and nothing is as it seems except for one thing, the files themselves. If something is top secret, it literally says so with a bright red stamp.

Just like on the file Foxx was holding.

“Okay. So what can you share?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. He’d obviously woken me up to tell me more than just the dinner was off. At least you better have, Foxx…

“Sadira Yavari has killed before,” he said, “and the other victim was also a nuclear physicist.”

I had to let that sink in for a few seconds. The implications. What it could mean. The questions it gave rise to.

“Was he also Iranian?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Was he tied to the Iranian nuclear program?”

“Yes.”

“Was he the same as Darvish? A double agent?”

Foxx suddenly got hard of hearing. I didn’t ask him where the hit on this other nuclear physicist had taken place, but that’s the question he answered. “The guy was on holiday in London, three years ago,” he said.

“Holiday?”

“Just go with it.”

Foxx was more than walking the line on what he could and couldn’t tell me. He was tap-dancing. “How about you just nod at the appropriate moment,” I said.

Any agency can get burned once with a double agent, the CIA included. Getting burned twice takes a special set of circumstances, if not an extraordinary level of incompetence. Unless, of course, it was a separate intelligence agency getting burned. Foxx had made a point of mentioning London.

“This other nuclear physicist,” I said. “He was doubling for MI6, wasn’t he?” Foxx hesitated for a moment until deciding that, yes, this was the appropriate moment for him to do as I’d asked. He nodded.

“Just like Darvish, dead in a hotel room,” he said. “A little different twist, though. Autoerotic asphyxia. He was found with a belt around his neck strapped to a clothes rod in the closet.”

“Again, it was made to look as if he were alone,” I said.

“Yes. An accidental death.”

Only it couldn’t be. The Brits had to know something was amiss. Or maybe it was Foxx who just now helped them put it together. Otherwise, Foxx and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“Did they know it was Yavari?” I asked.

“Not until about an hour ago,” he said. “She didn’t use Halo, just a good old-fashioned wig and glasses. They had surveillance footage of her in the hotel lobby with the guy. Back then, when it happened, she was thought to be Israeli. The decision was made to look the other way. They let it be.”

The reason they thought Yavari was Israeli was because the only other real possibility was that she was CIA, and if she were, Langley would’ve at least given MI6 a heads-up, if not outright involved them.

“So you gave MI6 a photo of Yavari,” I said.

“From her NYU bio, yes.”

“And because she didn’t use Halo they were able to confirm it was her.”

“The match was 89 percent.”

For facial recognition systems, especially given that she was wearing a disguise, that was as good as a lock.

My date with Sadira Yavari had always been a gamble, but the stakes had now changed. It wasn’t just me who’d be taking a risk. There was now interagency intel involved. Documentation. A file. Stamped TOP SECRET, no less.

In other words, Foxx now had a lot on the line as well. Namely his job. That was for one reason and one reason only.

“Go ahead and say it,” I told him.

He said it. “You’re a civilian, Reinhart. You’re just a goddamn civilian.”

As long as that was the case, Foxx couldn’t allow me to engage with Yavari. It didn’t matter who or what I was in the past. No, as far as the Agency was concerned, my days as an operative entitled me to a pension and not much else. That was then; this is now. I was nothing more than a civilian. A goddamn civilian.

“But what if I wasn’t?” I asked.

Foxx shot me a look. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Book Five Staring Down the Devil

Chapter 91

“ARE YOU ready to kill?” asked the Mudir.

He’d assembled his team again in the basement of the mosque in lower Manhattan. He had news for them. The timetable had changed. The attack would now be sooner. There would be more attacks to come as well.

As always, the Mudir had chosen his words very carefully. The idea that there were more missions was essential to preparing his men. Generals fought wars; soldiers fought battles. The Mudir had read that in a book about Patton while studying at Princeton. Battles—and, ultimately, wars—are won by those soldiers who believe they are invincible.

The Mudir was a voracious reader. He’d read Darwin and understood the nature of survival. Adapt or die.

He’d read Adam Smith, too. He knew that one of the great ironies about Islamic terrorism aimed against the West was how beholden it was to the tenets of capitalism. When the demand for suicide bombers exceeds the supply, changes have to be made. And no matter how much ISIS recruited, no matter how vigilant its efforts, the demand was always destined to exceed the supply. Especially in America.

Martyrs were truly a dying breed.

Once more, the Mudir took the men through their positions in the train station, emphasizing their exit strategy as much as everything else they needed to remember. The only other change beyond the timing was that he himself would be joining them in the massacre. The Mudir wanted even more casualties. Even more suffering.

For this final meeting before the attack, he had arrived early, before any of the twelve. He had placed burner phones on each of their chairs assembled around his table. He’d also turned off the air-conditioning. Heat and sweat force the mind to focus.

The Mudir hadn’t read that anywhere. He had lived it. Especially during his years in Islamabad. In the capital of Pakistan was where the Mudir had learned to focus. It was there that he had tried to get a message to Bin Laden. Bin Laden’s trusted courier had been compromised, his pseudonym surrendered to an interrogator at Guantánamo Bay.

But the Mudir’s message was never received. Two weeks later, Bin Laden was dead.

“Does everyone understand what their job is?” he asked the twelve, their faces shiny and dripping. The basement now felt like a sauna, but the men knew better than to wipe the sweat from their brows. Their only focus was the Mudir.