sick fear had taken root and blossomed in her chest as the hours crept past.
Ryan had given her a cell phone number for emergencies, but she reached only his voice mail
each time she tried to call. Then she attempted to reach him by calling Langley direct, but they
refused to give her any information, instead referring her to a hotline set up to handle calls from
friends and relatives of the victims. Victims. The word echoed in her head. It was hard to
imagine Ryan being victimized by anything, but she couldn’t shake the fear, and the panic
threatened to consume her — if he was okay, he would have called. She knew he would have
called. By the time she reached the Avis counter, it was all she could do to keep from screaming.
Forty-five minutes later, Katie’s rented Taurus screeched to a halt outside Georgetown
University Hospital. A uniformed police officer yelled at her as she ran through the assembled
crowd of reporters and into the building, leaving the car unattended with the keys still in the
ignition. A preoccupied nurse absently waved her toward surgery care, which led in turn to a
large room decorated in a failed effort to project cheer. Katie could not imagine a more
despairing sight. The room was filled to capacity with frightened-looking people. She was dimly
aware of quiet whispers of support and low, muffled sobs.
With weak knees, she squeezed through the crowd to the desk and tried to speak to the woman
on the other side, but the words were slow in coming.
“Are you okay?” the attendant asked with a genuinely concerned expression. The young woman
standing before her looked terrible, hair plastered to her face, the skin around her eyes red and
puffy. “Take your time, honey. It’s going to be fine.”
Katie took a deep breath and rested her shaking hands on the counter for support. “I’m looking
for my fiancé, Ryan Kealey. Ryan Thomas Kealey.”
The nurse looked down through the list, shaking her head. “I don’t see anyone by that name.”
Katie felt her heart sink, but there was a glimmer of hope. Maybe he hadn’t even been at the
Kennedy-Warren. But if he was okay, why hadn’t he called? It just didn’t make sense… “Hold
on, honey, let me double-check.” As the nurse turned to question a harried surgeon, Katie
squeezed her eyes shut and willed herself to breathe again.
“Katie?”
She looked up to see him standing in the doorway, a large bandage covering the left side of his
face. She could see long tears in his leather jacket, streaks of dried blood on his stained jeans and
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the backs of his hands. He hadn’t called… It didn’t matter, because he was there, alive. Her right
hand flew to her mouth, the other reaching out for him as the tears streamed down her face.
“So you’re both okay?” Harper asked. Ryan was pressed uncomfortably into a booth just
outside of the hospital, a pay phone held to his ear. He needed to be outside for a while. The
thin wall housing the phone rubbed at a long stripe of raw skin on his left arm, and the pain
worked with the bite of the air to remind him that he was still breathing.
“We’ll make it. A lot of other people didn’t,” he replied. “Naomi’s right arm was banged
around pretty bad. I was sure it was broken, but the X-rays came back negative. They gave her a
sedative; she’s asleep now, I think. Suicide bombers in D.C. The audacity of these bastards.
John… I don’t know how to fight that.”
“We just got the first numbers.” Harper paused for a moment, beats of silence filling the empty
space. “As of 5:00 PM, 64 dead, 121 injured. Obviously, that’s going to climb tomorrow when
they finish going through the rubble.”
Ryan didn’t respond. There didn’t seem to be much to say.
“Listen, you’ve had a long day. If it hasn’t caught up with you, it will. We’ll talk in the morning.”
A longer pause this time.
Harper sounded tired. Tired and weak. The combination served to gently ease yet another yoke
down onto Ryan’s shoulders, the burden of uncertainty. He wondered how much more he could
carry before he crumbled under the weight.
“It’s good to hear your voice, Kealey. I was worried there for a while. Give my regards to
Naomi — the department already sent flowers to her room.”
“That was good of you, John. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
After hanging up the phone, he leaned against the cold brick wall facing the hospital, looking up
into the black emptiness. Ryan noticed that his hands were shaking, but he couldn’t will them to
stop. He had seen many awful things in his life, far more than most, but knew that he would
never forget the images that had confronted him through the choking dust after pulling Naomi
out of the crushed van.
Now those terrible scenes reminded him of others, and he rushed to quickly push the thoughts
from his mind. Searching frantically for something else to focus on, anything else, he found
himself thinking about what he had overheard Katie saying earlier. My fiancé… I’m looking for
my fiancé, Ryan Kealey.
They had never talked about marriage, and at first glance the idea seemed completely
implausible. They had barely known each other six months, and he had never even met her
family. Now that he thought about it, she had never mentioned them. In truth, though, he was
more than ready to leave this life behind and start a family of his own. There had been women in
the past, of course, but none that he cared about so much. If pressed, he wouldn’t have been
able to say exactly why.
Although extremely intelligent, she was ruled by emotion, a fact that Ryan found both
fascinating and a little overwhelming. There was nothing petty in Katie Donovan — for her,
feeling decided what happened next; it was real, and could be trusted. Sometimes, the passion
she exuded was almost frightening in its intensity. When she cared about something, she threw
her whole heart into it. She had thrown her heart into him, he could see that now. For a woman
who would jump on a plane and travel hundreds of miles to be by his side, Ryan thought he
would give anything.
He walked back across long shadows in the street, to the woman he had saved and the woman
who might yet save him.
CHAPTER 9
IRAN
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The icy, intertwined limbs of the oak and conifer trees climbed high above the narrow side street
running north from Niyavaran Park. The very highest points of the branches dangled heavily
before yellow sodium lights that spilled down onto wet pavement shining in the cold drizzle.
The light did not spread too far, as if it knew that the darkest corners of the city were best left to
their own devices, alone and unrevealed.
Except for the hypnotic sound of the gentle rain, the streets of Tehran were silent as the night
grew deep.
Ali Ahmedi, twenty-eight years old, six-year veteran of the Komiteh, the Iranian Secret Police,
was hunched in the doorway of a dimly lit restaurant. The hood of his anorak was over his head,
his breath steamed in the air. By his side, he held the Kalishnikov that could be bought for less
than thirty American dollars in the markets at the city center. His weapon was better maintained
than most, the bolt free of rust, with a light coat of oil. As soon as he was permitted, he would
find a warm, comfortable place on the floor inside and clean the weapon again. Ahmedi took
pride in his work, a deep pride that left little time for his wife and infant child. He was
particularly pleased with his current assignment, despite the inclement weather. Across the street,
a second guard was well concealed in a dark alley. The young officer counted himself fortunate;
the alley had no overhead cover, and his friend would be well soaked by now.
Behind Ahmedi, past the grimy windows set in stout wooden frames, beyond the tables and
chairs of rough-hewn oak, two men enjoyed a simple meal of lamb kebab and boiled rice.
A third guard drifted through the seating area in the foreground, an Uzi submachine gun slung
carelessly across his chest. His eyes, though, were constantly moving over the dark shadows of
the room, paying particular attention to the swinging door that led to the kitchen in the rear of
the building. The two men and the guard; otherwise, the restaurant was empty.
Saif al-Adel pushed his plate away and leaned back in his chair, a contented expression settling
over his narrow features. His face was almost feminine in appearance, with full lips, a long,
straight nose, and pale, flawless skin pulled taut over high cheekbones. He took his time
speaking, as was his custom; in the dangerous business that was his, one did not last by making
rash comments or hasty decisions.
Hamza watched the man carefully. He was ever cautious of his fellow Egyptian’s volatile mood
swings. They were difficult to catch; the signs could be as subtle as a small inclination of the
head, a narrowing of the eyes. For Saif al-Adel, the word volatile held a different connotation
than it did for the vast majority of humanity. Hamza had personally witnessed what the other
man’s silent rage could lead to. Thinking about it now, he was brought back to an incident that
had taken place nearly two years earlier….
The sands of the endless desert south of Kabul burned beneath the fiery orb above. Late in June
of 2002, the morale within the organization was low, tempers flaring easily in the extreme
temperatures that accompanied the rising and setting of the sun. The Afghans were afraid, and
they tried to hide the fear with aggression and bluster. The fear could be attributed to the
Americans, and to the MH-60 helicopters that would come low over the desert at night, and to
the Special Forces soldiers that would fast-rope down to the desert floor below. Because of the
fear, discipline was almost nonexistent in the flat expanse stretching in every direction. Young
members of the organization congregated in large groups outside the caves, firing their weapons
wildly into the air with complete disregard for the Western satellites that passed overhead.
Hassan Hamza, while taking inventory of American Stinger missiles in the cool hollows of the
stone outcropping, was drawn to the light outside by elevated voices.
Saif al-Adel, the recently installed commander of the military wing of Al-Qaeda, passed a small
cluster of vociferous young volunteers. He heard the name of Muhammed Atef, his predecessor
— until the day the Americans had come with their stolen coordinates and laser-guided bombs.
He heard the sarcasm in the young voice, the snarled insults, and the derision that can be shown
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for the dead without fear of reprisal.
This is what Hamza saw: A junior member of the Taliban, maybe twenty years of age, held court
at the center of a small group. His rifle was more than an arm’s length away, half-buried in the
sand, forgotten by the soldier. The men surrounding him roared their approval at the vicious
humor, laughed at his biting tongue, but al-Adel was ignored at the periphery of the group. His
head was turning, the expression on his face did not change as he slipped the Makarov pistol free
from his belt. Then the head of the young soldier was pulled back and to the right, the crowd
scrambling away abruptly, startled shouts filling the air. The muzzle was jammed into the soft
flesh beneath the jawbone, brown eyes wide in surprise as the trigger was squeezed, and the top
of the boy’s head exploded up into the shimmering heat.
Saif al-Adel stood facing the stunned group of Taliban soldiers, the pistol loose in his right hand.
There were armed men at his back, but he did not turn to track their movements. He was
unafraid, and the statement had been made… The aggression faded from the eyes of the young
men, replaced by a muted fear. Hamza had seen it all.
And could see it still. The hatred was gone at the moment, displaced by the rapture that always
followed a successful operation. Hamza could feel it slinking just below the surface, though; for
Saif al-Adel, pleasure and murder were born in the same bottomless pit.
“Hassan, my old friend, you are to be congratulated.” The words were soft and sincere. Despite
himself, Hamza felt a strong swell of pride at the compliment. “The American is amazingly
proficient.” A brief pause. “He is also obstinate, sullen, and evasive. I do not trust him at all.”
The older man could concede that these descriptions were accurate. He had arrived at the same
conclusions long ago. He pulled at his ragged black beard while he framed a response.
“He is useful for what he can accomplish, and for what he can tell our soldiers. He is a gifted
teacher; I have seen it with my own eyes. A man who is Western in appearance and mannerisms,
but can speak numerous foreign languages with local dialects. A man who is able to instruct our
fighters on the use of improvised explosive devices, who can demonstrate sniping techniques out
to 500 meters without the benefit of a telescopic sight. Most importantly, a man who does not
boast, does not condescend when given the opportunity… What would you call such a man?”
The commander drank hot tea and averted his eyes. The answer was clear, but he did not want
to acknowledge the truth of it, because if it was true… If it was true, then he was no longer really
in control.
“He is an American,” he spat. “He can only be against us.”
“That is not so, Saif.”
“He cannot be trusted.”
“What more can he do?” Hamza asked reasonably. “How many citizens of his own country must
he kill before you place your faith in him?”
Silence for a moment, save for the easy footsteps of the guard moving past empty tables.
Hassan did not want to openly challenge the young commander. To do so would be to invite a
bullet in the early-morning hours, when he was curled tight against the cold. Loyalty did not
carry far when anger was stirred, and one man finally succumbed to heavy eyelids and the
pressure of commanding unruly boys who were not yet men. Maybe it would be the knife, held
tight against his throat with his arms pinned tight to his body; the end could come in any number
of ways. He did not want to take the chance.
“My friend, I understand your skepticism, because I share it.” Hamza studiously avoided the
word fear. “However, there comes a time when you must accept your good fortune, and use it
to your advantage. It is a dangerous weapon we use, but with care it can take us far. He was a
soldier, he was disgraced; that much is obvious… I know what you want. You want a complete
