Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

“The two of you are fools.”

“What?”

Charley cocked her gaze upward enough to briefly meet Tesla’s stare. “Why bother saving the world if you can’t enjoy it?”

“Charley, please… ”

“No, whatever it is the two of you share, I want you to know I’m fine with it. I’m honestly not sure you have any better idea how to define it than I do. But you need to make sense of it, for your own sakes.”

“Thank you.”

The doors slid open mechanically and Tesla wheeled Charley into the steaming air. It assaulted her skin like a blast furnace, seeming to instantly melt the make-up that had already turned her face into a Halloween mask. Tesla eased the chair up to the curb and raised a hand to hail a taxi.

Almost instantly, a grime-encrusted white sedan screeched forward, cutting off another cab in the queue. A fierce exchange of explosive Hindi shot back and forth and the winning cab, the sedan, pulled up in front of the women. Tesla busied herself with helping the costumed Charley out of the chair and helping her into the backseat. Leaving the airline-issued wheelchair by the curb, she walked around and climbed in the taxi’s driver side.

“What is your destination?” the ancient turbaned driver asked in awkward English. His massively wrinkled face glanced at them in the grimy rearview mirror.

“Take us to the Baglihar dam,” Tesla said.

Archer still had not heard from Jana and was fearing the worst even before word reached him that she was apparently en route to the United States-at least her cell phone was. He wondered if this was some form of cosmic punishment, that taking the life of his father had sentenced him to a life in isolation without the distractions of love and romance. No matter. He was young enough to enjoy the fruits of his labors and eventual power that would come once his work at the dam was done.

Still, he found Jana’s failure to contact him disturbing as he did the anomalies in the picture of the apparently dead daughter of Colonel Harold Middleton. And if Charlotte Middleton was still alive, then so was the female Volunteer Tesla, holding fast to Archer’s trail. It was a good thing he’d taken precautions, another legacy bequeathed him by Sikari himself.

As if on cue, Archer’s scrambled cell phone beeped and he raised it to check the incoming text message from the man he had dispatched to Kashmir.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Middleton stood in the cordoned-off security area, gazing up at the sky in expectation of the president’s arrival. The structure of the Baglihar dam beyond made for a magnificent spectacle. The only thing that even remotely approached it in size and scope was Nevada’s massive Hoover Dam. Then, as now, construction had gone forward in essentially a wilderness; desert for the Hoover, rural unpopulated land for the Baglihar. If the concrete used here was even half what it had been there, Middleton could see no way any explosives short of the nuclear variety, including thermobaric, could possibly destroy the facility. Nor could it result in the kind of collateral damage capable of reaching the place where the president would be speaking: essentially a sprawling, natural amphitheater built to offer stunning, tourist-friendly views of the Chenab River, its vast power now harnessed between a million tons of concrete and steel.

What exactly had Devras Sikari meant in his email to Balan?

You recall what I have planned for the ‘Village.’ It has to happen soon-before we can move on.

As he gazed at it, he thought: No wonder Pakistan had lodged such a vigorous protest with the U.N. Irrigation to a great bulk of the nation’s agriculture was now endangered, especially if the season turned any drier than normal. From one side of Pakistan to the other, people could find themselves going hungry, the perfect pretext on which to strike back. Middleton couldn’t help but wonder if that had been the plan from the beginning.

“I have something you need to see, comrade,” Chernayev said, suddenly at Middleton’s side, holding out his BlackBerry. “The man pictured is named Umer, a known associate of both Sikari and Archer who helped them obtain the explosives. General Zang’s intelligence indicates he will be the one to trigger the explosion.”

“It makes no sense.”

“What?”

“Why go through all this trouble to set off explosives inside a dam they can’t effectively destroy?”

Chernayev shrugged. “A show of force, perhaps, of power as a precursor to something much worse.”

“No, this was about assassinating the secretary of state from the beginning. Now it’s the president. That’s what we’re facing.”

“Once my men locate Archer’s men, it’ll be sometime before we’ll have to face him again. And if we’re lucky enough to find the boy himself… ”

Middleton turned about, gazing off toward the huge throng stretching well into the thousands pulsing into the natural amphitheater from which the President of the United States would christen the opening of the dam with unprecedented pomp and circumstance.

“Any luck so far?”‘

Chernayev shrugged again. “It is a very large crowd, comrade. But my men are good and know what to look for.”

“The BlueWatch people?”

“ Da . And, believe me, Colonel, they’ve been trained for this kind of work.”

“What kind of work is that?”

“Up-close termination.”

“Like shooting a radioactive pellet into a defector’s leg?”

Chernayev grinned, winked. “Now, comrade, where did you ever get an idea like that?”

Their eyes moved to the sky simultaneously alert by the distant whooping sound of a helicopter. Middleton could feel the Russian tense even as his own spine snapped erect.

The president was arriving.

“I won’t be able to get you much closer than this.”

“That’s OK,” Tesla told the driver. “We’ll manage.”

The driver regarded the hobbled Charley in his rearview mirror and continued, “But there is a VIP section, much, much closer to the official ceremony. Perhaps you have some sort of press or political credentials… ”

“As a matter of fact I do,” Tesla lied. And passed him $50.

He beamed. “Then I will do my best to get you there.”

The driver swung right, drove down an isolated stretch of hastily flattened road toward a security fence manned by a trio of Indian special police. They signaled the cab to stop, one coming round to the driver’s side while the other two kept to their posts ahead of the car’s hood.

Tesla turned toward Charley, prepared to offer some reassuring words when a sudden flash of motion snapped her attention back to the front seat. The driver’s hands were suddenly off the wheel, both grasping silenced pistols. Before she could react, he had thrust them out the window and opened fire on the approaching guard and the two standing at the front of the car.

The angle of the shots should have been impossible. Unless it was practiced. No one was around to see their murders.

Tesla gasped. Her first instinct was to protect Charley. Weaponless, there was little more that she could do.

Then, from the corner of her eye, she saw another man slip from the bushes, where, apparently he’d been waiting. Dressed in local clothing, with a long beard, he walked quickly to the driver’s window. He spoke in Hindi to the driver, then turned to the women.

“You are please to come with me. Now.” He said something else but his words vanished as the president’s helicopter, flanked by a pair of gun ships, soared overhead.

Archer’s cell phone beeped to signal an incoming text and he raised it upward, shielding it from the sun, to read Umer’s message:

IN PLACE. ALL IS READY.