Marc Cameron - National Security

“I’m a federal agent,” Quinn yelled over his shoulder, keeping his hands in the air.

“Is that a fact?” the trooper said, his voice icy with professional calm. “So, the feds are hiring ninjas now to go on sword patrol? Frankly, mister, I don’t care who you are. You better have a damn good reason for chop-pin’ that sombitch’s head off.”

Thibodaux and Mahoney came up on the eastbound lanes and screeched to a stop on the far shoulder. “He’s one of the good guys,” Thibodaux called out, his hands in the air so as not to alarm the trooper any more than he already was. Quinn turned his head just enough to see Mahoney running toward the tangled wreckage of the red Harley where it was piled up along the guard rail. She’d taken the time to throw on a protective hood and gloves but wore no other safety gear.

Two more black-and-whites skidded to a halt on the gravel shoulder. Now that he had more guns on the scene, the original trooper finally allowed Quinn to lower his hands and show identification.

“What the hell is OSI doing hacking people to death on my highway?”

“We need to get a perimeter set up around the body,” Quinn said, nodding toward the center of the interstate. He watched from a distance as Mahoney stooped to examine the wreckage. “I know this seems odd, but we need to locate the head and make sure no one gets near that either. This guy has some seriously contagious diseases.” Quinn looked at the three troopers, capable lawmen all, but none over thirty. He thought they might not even know what hemorrhagic fever was. “The stuff he has makes swine flu look like diaper rash.”

“Well, why didn’t you say he was sick?” the first trooper on the scene scoffed, looking at Quinn through narrowed eyes. “That’s a damn good reason for chop-pin’ someone’s head off with a sword…”

Quinn ignored him. He put the Night Rod on its center stand and started to walk toward the wreckage, where Zafir’s body was plainly visible. Surprised to see Megan stand and remove her protective hood, he broke into a run, adrenaline still pumping from his wild ride.

Twenty feet away he noticed all the blood had drained from Mahoney’s face. “What?” he said, slowing to a trot. “What is it?”

Megan closed her eyes, raising her face toward the sky. Her shoulders were shaking. “Zafir Jawad lost his fingers during the first Gulf War,” she said. “This guy still has the stitches from where his were amputated no more that two weeks ago. He’s a decoy. We let the real Zafir get away.”

Zafir smiled to himself as he drove. Surely Allah the merciful smiled upon his mission. One of the sheikh’s servants, a man named Isam, had called to warn him.

The Americans knew. There were people waiting at Carrie Navarro’s house. It made sense that Farooq would send someone to watch over him, someone to protect him from such things and ensure he was able to complete his assigned move in the Game. Zafir gripped the wheel of his rental car until his fingers turned white and pondered the bravery of such men. Their death was now a certainty-if not from the duties of protection, at the very least from the ensuing plague. Such was the purest of devotion to Jihad.

Navarro had now gone into hiding. He cursed the infidel Jericho for finding the photographs. It had been stupid to leave them in the lab… but who would have imagined someone making his way into the Kingdom undetected? Zafir consoled himself with the fact that in the end, none of that would matter. Photographs or not, millions of infidels would ultimately die a horrific death from the virus he carried within his body. A smile spread over his face at the thought, but turned into a shiver as considered what the illness would do to him first. He reached in his pocket to touch the small vial of poison that would rescue him when the pain was too great to bear. In the mirror he saw beads of sweat on his brow and wondered if he might not be contagious earlier than Suleiman had believed.

Zafir pulled over at a highway rest area on the edge of Fort Worth to look at Gail Taylor’s iPhone. He’d spent months learning everything there was to know about Carrie Navarro while she’d been his prisoner. There was no place for her to hide. He used the remaining fingers of his disfigured hand to punch a name into the search engine just as Gail Taylor had showed him. He caught a whiff of her heady scent again on his collar, but pushed it from his mind. In no time he found the address he wanted and entered that into the GPS on his dash. In Iraq or the Saudi Kingdom finding the specific address of a person might take days and require the torture of many relatives. The Americans made it so easy. Sophisticated technology cut away privacy like an well-sharpened axe.

Zafir put the car back into gear and pulled out of the rest area to join the flow of interstate traffic heading west, into the sun. Finally so near his goal, he felt a familiar stirring, a warm rush, low in his belly. Very soon, Navarro would experience indescribable agony. She would die-but it would not be the virus that killed her.

Carrie couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. The walls of her mother’s three-story farmhouse were beginning to close in around her. She found it difficult to breathe, let alone think. For the first time in five years, she lit a cigarette. The terrifying notion that Zafir Jawad was in the United States was more than she could wrap her brain around. With the help of Dr. Soto, she’d only just come to grips with the nightmares of her past life. Now this man who’d committed unspeakable acts of cruelty for so many months had reared his head again. The mere thought of his face made her retch.

She took a long drag on the cigarette, willing it unsuccessfully to calm her twitching nerves. Christian lay on his belly in front of the television holding his nose at the smoke and watching a Transformers cartoon. Her mother had stepped into the bedroom to take a phone call from a neighbor.

Two federal agents-neither looked old enough to shave-occupied the living room by force, trying to seem inconspicuous. She could tell from their barely concealed sneers that neither considered this a top-shelf assignment. One sat on the recliner in the corner reading a paperback spy thriller. The other stood by the window talking to his wife on the cell phone about her shopping habits and their mountain of credit card debt. Both had their jackets off and their pistols were exposed. At the foot of the one reading the book was a discreet black case Carrie knew contained some sort of machine gun. It would not be enough. Pistols, rifles, swords, or atom bombs-it didn’t matter. She knew Zafir. He was too smart. If he wanted her, she was a sitting duck. No matter where she hid or what anyone did, he’d find her. There was no getting around it. He was too close, too strong. She alternately clenched her fists and relaxed them as Dr. Soto had taught her, struggling in vain to calm her erratic breathing.

She stubbed out her cigarette on one of her mother’s china saucers, fighting off the feeling that the room was getting smaller. Her eyes shot from her little boy to the back door and she suddenly realized what she had to do. She couldn’t just sit still and wait for him to come kill her.

Smiling at the two agents as she passed the adjoining room, Carrie walked into the kitchen. Pretending to rummage through the refrigerator, she scanned for possible weapons, finally settling on an eight-inch chef’s knife from her mother’s wooden block. Wrapping the blade in a rolled dishtowel, she stuffed it down the waist of her jeans, over the small of her back. She tugged the tail of her loose cotton T-shirt over the top of her pants to cover it, then stood at the kitchen door. She motioned to Christian, touching a finger to her lips to keep him quiet.