Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

Middleton glanced outside and saw a cluster of Indian troops walking past. More security, he assumed, though they no longer had the key prisoner to guard. They’d have to be satisfied with a mere hit woman.

Then he felt an itch. Something was wrong.

What was it?

He glanced at Archer’s phone, which sat nearby in an evidence bag. He recalled again the last message: “Mission accomplished.”

And he realized something else. Jana wasn’t the least troubled by her capture. And she’d been talking quite freely. In the past ten minutes she’d admitted to several murders.

Hell, the only way she would share information like this was if…

Her dark, beautiful face turned to him and smiled.

Middleton understood the text message: Archer had put an extraction plan in place to get him out of the area after the explosions at the dam. One of his associates texted him that the plan was ready to go. Jana had undoubtedly been in touch and explained that Archer was dead, but she was taking over the operation and needed to be extracted from the dam site.

Middleton cried, “Everyone, get down! Get-”

Automatic gunfire erupted outside, and, with a piercing crack, a frame charge ripped a large hole in the flimsy side of the trailer. Tear gas canisters rolled inside and filled the room with unbearable fumes.

Despite the near blindness and the fire in his lungs, Middleton lunged for Jana. Her hands were cuffed but her feet weren’t shackled and, though she was as impaired as the rest of them by the CS gas, she’d noted exactly where the rent in the trailer wall was before the cloud filled the room. She stumbled to it and flung herself out-into the waiting arms of the rescue party.

The band of insurgents loyal to Archer, unaware of Jana’s betrayal, laid down covering fire as they retreated.

Middleton and Barrett-Bone struggled outside, crawling from cover to cover. More tear gas clouds were rising and none of the Indian or SAS troops knew what was going on.

Middleton finally spotted a group of a dozen people vanish into a clearing, where a helicopter was waiting. He didn’t see Jana, but he knew this had to be the raiding party; as one man stepped through a band of sun, Middleton saw a golden flash off his wrist.

Its source, he knew, was a copper bracelet.

What was about to happen had been a long, long time coming.

This was the thought in the mind of the slim woman walking down the busy street of an overcast London. Autumn wind swirled grit and papers and crisp leaves around her.

At a street corner she paused and pulled her overcoat more tightly around her. She oriented herself and spotted her destination: the Tufnell Park mosque.

Someone jostled the briefcase she carried, but Jana Grover kept a firm grip on it. No enemy knew she was here-it was just a teenage girl obliviously on a mobile-but had a mugger tried to take the case from her, she would have killed him in an instant.

Yes, the briefcase was that important.

Indeed, its contents were the centerpiece of Devras Sikari’s ultimate plan.

She glanced down at the street and saw the faded white-painted message “Look Right.” A warning to pedestrians that traffic could come barreling along from an unexpected direction.

This amused her a great deal. The light changed and she started across the street, toward the mosque.

Trying to imagine the consequences of what was about to happen.

Monumental.

Dodging the stream of pedestrians. Some were Anglo: girls and boys in school uniforms or hoodies, delivery people, stiffly dressed businessmen, solid women navigating shabby perambulators. Mostly, though, Arabs, Iranians, Pakis… A few Sikhs and Indians, too.

London, what a melting pot.

Jana was wearing Western clothing, but pants. Also, of course, a head scarf. She had to blend in.

And she thought again: a long time coming.

Clutching her precious briefcase, she arrived at the mosque and walked around the nondescript building, which was one of the few here free from graffiti. It was one of the biggest in London. Nearly twenty-five hundred men prayed here daily; women too, though shunted ignominiously away behind dirty curtain partitions.

Jana looked for security. Nothing out of the ordinary. She needn’t worry.

All was going according to the plan.

She paused near the entrance. Shivered as a gust of wind swept over her.

And she turned, walked into the Café Nero across the street, ordered a latte.

In this neighborhood, even in a Starbucks-like coffee shop chain, it was a bit unusual to see a woman alone without her husband or brother or a clutch of girlfriends. Traditional values flowed strongly here. In fact, an honor killing by a Pakistani brother of his eloped sister had taken place only two blocks away.

As Jana took her coffee, sat and shrugged off her coat, a bearded man in a turban walked in and regarded her contemptuously, despite the conservative outfit she wore and the scarf.

She decided if he made any comment to her, she would, at some point, hurt him very, very badly.

He took his tea, muttering to himself. Undoubtedly about infidels, women and respect.

Another glance at the mosque.

And she felt the exhilaration of a mission nearly completed.

The mission that was Devras Sikari’s life plan.

Devras had been one of the most brilliant revolutionaries of his time. While Chernayev and Zang and Archer and the Mujahedeen believed that their goals could be achieved by explosives and gunfire, Devras knew that was short-sighted, the approach of the simple-minded. Childish.

Why, look at Palestine and Israel, look at Sri Lanka and the Tamal Tigers, England and the IRA. Look at Africa.

Oh, there was nothing wrong with violence as a surgical tool; it was necessary to eliminate risks. But as a means to achieve a political end?

It was inefficient.

Devras understood that the best way to achieve his goal of Kashmiri independence involved a different, far more potent weapon than thermobaric explosives, snipers or suicide bombers.

That weapon?

Desire, want, craving.

At Cambridge and afterward, Devras Sikari-along with her father and their Indian classmate-had indeed managed to duplicate the copper bracelet technology that had been perfected by the Germans during World War II. She’d lied to Middleton and the others about that.

In fact, the three men went far beyond the original design and created an astonishingly simple and productive system for the creation of heavy water.

But, realizing its potential and how he might exploit it, Devras insisted on patenting only a portion of the technology, leaving out key parts of the science, without which it would be impossible to bring the system online.

In the briefcase she carried now were the encrypted diagrams, formulae and specifications of these core elements omitted from the patents.

This was Devras’s plan: to trade the copper bracelet technology to the major OPEC countries in exchange for their agreement to force India, China and Pakistan into partitioning Kashmir and ultimately granting independence. If the three “occupying” nations didn’t do this, the petroleum producers would start to turn off the spigots of oil, and the factories and utilities and the oh-so-important cheap cars filling the subcontinent would die of thirst.

The Middle Eastern countries craved nukes; China and the Indian subcontinent craved oil.

She would spend the next few hours here meeting one at a time with representatives from these countries, men who were presently praying in the mosque. Their souls longed for spiritual ecstasy, their hearts for fissionable material.

Allah was presumably satisfying the first and Jana would fulfill the second.

She hefted the briefcase onto the table. Inside were six 8-gig thumb drives with the encrypted technology on them. She knew the men would be delighted with what she brought to the table. And what was particularly attractive was that the technology was compact and efficient and the facilities would be largely off the grid, hard to detect by even the sharpest eyes in the sky.