John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

There was a poker standing beside the fireplace with some other tools, and without thinking, Wilson grabbed it. Maddox staggered backwards in a panic, stumbling against a coffee table, hands in front of his face.

“Hey-” he said.

Wilson drove the poker into the side of Maddox’s knee, dropping him to the ground with a scream that kept on giving. He looked around. The door was still open, but it didn’t matter. This wasn’t going to take long. He slammed the poker into Maddox’s shoulder. Then the other shoulder. And again.

Tossing the poker aside, he got down on his haunches beside the man who’d set him up. “Jesus, Robbie, it’s been a long time! How you been?”

“Ohhh, man…” Maddox’s voice was a low quaver, a mixture of terror, pain, and recognition. His speech came breathlessly, in gasps. “I didn’t know ! I mean, what I was doing, I – I’m sorry, man! I’m really-”

Wilson reached into his jumpsuit, withdrew the K-bar knife.

Maddox saw it, and sunk deeper into the shag rug. “Please…”

Wilson buried the knife to its hilt in Maddox’s chest, then pulled it out and made sure of things. Grabbing him by the ponytail, he jerked the snitch’s head to the side, and back, and slashed his throat.

Then he got to his feet, surprised to find himself out of breath, watching the dark blood pool around his shoes. As he started to leave, a thought occurred to him, and he turned back. I really ought to take his scalp, Wilson thought. It would be, like, an homage. He considered the idea for a long ten seconds, standing in the doorway with the knife, dripping in his hand.

But in the end, he decided against it. He wasn’t a savage, after all, and besides – where would he put it?

After a long, long day, Andrea Cabot was drifting in a pleasant half sleep that promised to deepen into the real thing when something began to nag at her. She shifted position and tugged at one of her pillows. She’d already pulled two all-nighters this week, and she was dead tired. She longed to be unconscious.

And so she drifted down, a delicious, lolling descent into a real slumber… when a bolt of realization jerked her upright.

It’s a test! Culpeper was a test!

The phrase swam up from her memory. She’d been with 2-TIC at the time and she’d been looking at surveillance footage with a Brit from MI-6 and that chubby guy from the Bureau – what was his name?

Kovalenko.

The three of them watched it over and over: the man with the hat and the sling, the man who’d left a pair of suitcases packed with newspapers near the British Airways counter and then departed. Which had caused the evacuation of the terminal.

It’s a test, Kovalenko said, after they’d screened the footage for about the tenth time. And he was right. Andrea knew he was right.

The Brit didn’t get it. If you want to blow up the airport, why not just do it? he’d asked. Why practice?

But the Brit had been missing the point. The test was not to see if the man in the sling could get the suitcases into a dangerous position. The test was to see if the man would do it. The man was being tested, not the plan.

Woven through this recollection was everything she knew about Culpeper – what she’d seen on CNN and what she knew from the cables and gossip. Culpeper was a black hole. But why Culpeper? Why just Culpeper?

Everyone thought it was because of the banking nexus there, that it had been a strike at the financial heart of the west. But Cabot didn’t buy that. The presence of SWIFT and the Federal Reserve installation may have played a part in target selection, but she thought the attack was confined to Culpeper because it was a test.

But a test of what?

This was where the third, truly alarming, train of thought came in. This one involved Hakim Mussawi, lying on the table, coming off the Anectine paralysis. She’d check the transcripts, but she didn’t think she was mistaken in her recollection.

“There’s an American!” he’d gasped, spitting out the words as if they could save his life. “He’s building a machine. ”

What kind of machine? she’d wanted to know. Thinking, of course, a bomb.

But no. Mussawi said that the American was building a machine that was going to stop the world.

Or not exactly that. It was going to stop the motor of the world.

It was this phrase, gasped out in extremis, that now caused the hair on the back of her neck to stand up.

What had the expert on CNN said that morning? He’d been talking about an old movie, but what he’d said was: “For Culpeper, the world has stopped.”

Andrea squeezed her eyes shut. There was something else: that fuckup in Berlin, the Bobojon Simoni mess. The follow-up intel from that fit into this somehow. She threw on her clothes. Was she crazy? Did this shit actually fit ?

Though she almost never drove herself, she was in no mood to wait for her driver. Getting the BMW from the garage, she launched the car into the chaos of KL’s streets, where even at two a.m., there was a surprising amount of traffic. Despite the hurry she was in, she took the time to make sure she wasn’t being followed. Keeping her eyes on the rearview mirror, she made a series of left turns, effectively turning in a circle over the course of a dozen blocks, then reversed her course with a U-turn in the middle of a crowded intersection.

She ought to call Berlin, she told herself. Pete Spagnola was the guy. She’d pick his brain, try to nail it down: What was it about the Simoni incident that set off the alarm in the back of her head?

Then there was Mussawi. He was being held on an aircraft carrier in the Sea of Japan. She was going to need another session with him. She’d need to chopper in.

And last but not least, Ray Kovalenko. That thing with the suitcases. There was no reason to think that the man in the sling had even been a U.S. national, let alone the “American” Mussawi was screaming about. But the surveillance footage from Dulles nagged at her and it wouldn’t hurt to touch base with Ray.

Cabot glanced up at the array of clocks – nine p.m. in Berlin. Unless there was something special happening, Pete wouldn’t be there. She called the switchboard. They could give her Pete’s home number.

But, no. He’d been “rotated” back to Langley. “His duties are being handled by Ms. Logan. Shall I connect you…?”

“Madison Logan.”

“You’re working late,” Andrea said.

“No, you’re working late,” said the preppy voice at the other end, displaying an impressive understanding of Cabot’s whereabouts.

“Yes, well, a thought woke me up and I wanted to talk to Pete. About Simoni? I’m assuming you-”

“I’m well briefed on that,” Logan reassured her. “How can I help?”

“Those steg files on Simoni’s computer. I’m talking about the bank accounts that received Qaeda money? I can’t quite remember, but didn’t one of them walk back to a U.S. national?”

“Well, that’s the thinking, although I’m not sure there’s actual proof. It was an account at the Cadogan Bank on St. Helier. Is this important?”

Cabot ignored the question. “Who handled the investigation of the account?”

“It was the FBI Legat in London,” Logan said. “Kovalenko.”

“Ray!” Cabot said.

“You seem surprised.”

“No, no,” Cabot reassured her. “Just a small world.”

As Kovalenko listened to Andrea Cabot, his stomach churned. And the longer he listened, the worse he felt.

She was giving him intel from a rendition, the interrogation of some raghead. And what she was saying made his heart stagger in his chest.