Retribution

PINNACLE BOOKS

Kensington Publishing Corp.

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

 

—V
OLTAIRE

 

T
he pilot gripped the yoke of the aircraft until her tiny, dark hands turned nearly white, choking off all circulation. The Cessna single-engine seaplane fought the wind as she kept it on its heading, south by southwest, just above the whitecaps churning below on Lake Michigan.

“
Allah Akbar
,” she kept repeating to herself in a whisper. “
Allah Akbar
.”

The floatplane was old, its white paint chipped particularly on the leading edges of the wings. She continued to fight the drag of the old Cessna Skylane and the wind, which flowed just off the nose of the aircraft.

The pilot was small; so small, in fact, that she sat in the pilot's seat on a cushion to raise her up. The seat belt hung on the floor, unused, as she had pulled the seat up as far as it would go so that her tiny feet could reach the aircraft's pedals.

“Allah, please be kind.”

The other seats had been removed. White bricks of explosives were stacked behind and around her. The Semtex had affected the weight of the aircraft, causing it to be even more sluggish in its movements. Her instrument panels featured empty holes where the transponder and other dials were once housed before being removed. All she had that remained was a compass.

The pilot pulled on the yoke as the airplane dipped in the wind. The two pontoons added even more drag, like a hand held out the window of a car by a child, flying no more than twenty feet above the white-foamed water. It was important for her to fly low, despite the driving snowstorm. The transponder's spot on the panel was empty for a reason. It was the transponder that marked the aircraft on radar.

The pilot looked at the map on her lap. A red circle noted the last marker she had just passed.

“South Haven Lighthouse.” She spoke the words to herself. The words couldn't be heard. The engine spewed oil, its cylinders old, but it was bought cheaply, and meant for only one flight.

She did the calculations in her head. “Seventy-eight miles.”

She was flying slowly. Very slowly. The weight and drag of the old pontoon plane heading nearly directly into the wind caused it to go no faster than a truck on a highway.

“A hundred and ten knots. At best, a hundred and ten,” she told herself.

The aircraft would be at the pier in less than half an hour.

“Then I turn.”

The pilot turned to the back, looked at the stacked bricks just behind her seat. Red wires led from a button on the yoke to the center of the block. It wasn't the plastic explosive that mattered. At best, that would leave a small crater. It was what was in the center of the blocks that mattered.

Death, she had long ago decided, would not be nearly so bad as her life. She tasted the salt of the tears as they rolled down her face and smiled.

She had been the child with the limp who still insisted on playing football with the boys. Americans called it soccer. In truth, it had been neither. They'd used a ball of tightly bound rags and socks held together by strips of plastic bags looped and knotted together like a web. The boys of Danish Abad had laughed at her, trying to keep up with her limp. After this, they would laugh no longer....

“I will be remembered.”

The Chechen had said it would be so. She smiled again. It was important to be remembered.

She lifted her head from the panel to the windshield, which had become coated with a light blue covering of ice and snow.

“Oh, shit!” she cried over the drone of the engine.

The shape of a ship suddenly emerged out of the white.

She dipped her right wing, pulling on the yoke, clinging to control of the aircraft as it slipped by the mass of black steel that had risen out of the white. It looked like a large, ore-carrying vessel, well over a thousand feet long. The rust of the ship and its dark ore cargo had been camouflaged by snow and ice, making the vessel nearly invisible.

In the flash of her eye, she saw a crew member running out of the bridge, waving at her. The deep sound of the horn seemed amplified by the cloud cover as it frantically repeated its warning. She felt the vibration from its sound through the aircraft's frame.

“Oh, Allah, I don't have much time.”

The odd sight of her low-flying aircraft would surely be called in on the ship's radio.

The pilot pushed the throttle forward, increasing the pitch of the engine.

In ten minutes, it would be too late. As soon as she turned due west, just beyond the pier, it would only be a matter of seconds.

“Death over humiliation!” Her loud shout of what had become her personal motto belied her true state: the brink of utter exhaustion.

So much she had done. And in such a short time since it all began.

CHAPTER 1

 

“O
'Donald.”

Maggie O'Donald looked up from the e-mail that had just arrived from Riyadh. She'd long ago grown weary of how Pat barked her last name when he wanted to get her attention. It seemed childish.

“You see this?” Pat Stuart peered through the attic office window, a square of bulletproof glass no wider than a framed diploma. The light from outside had dimmed from the typical bright blazing Qatari sunshine to an ominous gray, giving Pat's face a cold pallor.

“You know what
simoon
means?” he asked.

She thought a moment.

“Devil's wind?” Maggie had been in Qatar as a CIA case officer for only a few months, her Arabic still lacking depth.

Pat shook his head. “A poison wind.”

Translation notwithstanding, Maggie knew perfectly well what a
simoon
was: a violent windstorm from the west that could mean several days of choking, blowing dust. Winds could reach up to fifty miles an hour as sand and dust crept into every exposed corner, leaving a film of yellow, claylike particles in one's ears and hair and clothes. Even if you wore a surgical mask, you'd find grit in your mouth for days.

The last
simoon
had stripped the color from Maggie's new car, a titanium-green Taurus SEL that she had so proudly picked up at the import desk at the Doha docks only a month earlier. An industrial sandblaster couldn't have done a better job of reducing the vehicle to its primer coat. She'd felt literally sick when she saw it. But, right now, sandstorms posed the least of Maggie's worries.

She returned her focus to the hot e-mail. If it leaked, several would die, including, in all probability, the source. Even if it didn't leak, the survival rate would be low for anyone connected to it. She remembered that term from her training at Langley.

“This one's gonna be bad,” Pat said, still focused on the coming storm.

Maggie shook her head, trying to focus on the emergency at hand. W. Patrick Stuart III loved to talk.

“You may have to cancel your little weekend in Kuwait,” he added.

Maggie's occasional trips to Kuwait were off-limits, even to Pat. And he knew it.

Maggie had put up with her office roommate for more than three months now. In the first week she'd quickly learned that Pat was a true buttoned-down type, a man who wore medium starch in his blue-striped shirts even on a sweltering 103-degree Qatarian day. As the United States embassy's regional security officer, Pat considered the unrest in the Gulf an “opportunity.” It certainly was the place to be for an advancing member of the diplomatic corps.

Maggie had also learned that Pat had a weekly habit of removing everything from his desk and polishing it with a bottle of furniture wax he kept in a lower drawer. The pencils were all lined up in a row, always on the left. Only number twos. A white writing pad on the right. She accused him of being a Prussian, everything kept strictly in order.

And that's not bad,
she thought,
if that is what he really wants.

As for Margaret Elizabeth O'Donald, since her days at Stanford she had been the polar opposite of Pat Stuart, always the one with her desk piled too high. Copies of
Jane's
on weapons and shipping were shuffled with satellite imagery and intelligence memos across her desk.
Jane's
was a spy's bible. The encyclopedia of weapons and war machines contained the specifics on every killing machine ever made. And Maggie took great pride in knowing exactly where each copy lay, along with the scattered photos and documents. She also knew the mess drove Stuart crazy.

Maggie's desk had one other unique feature. In the corner stood a very small photo frame with no photo in it. The bright gold frame, no bigger than a passport, surrounded only a blank, white mat background. Odd as it might look to a visitor, Maggie knew which photograph belonged there—a picture of her lover and herself on an ivy-covered path leading into Battery Kemble Park in northwest D.C. It had become their traditional meeting place. They had put both of their careers at risk simply by having the photo taken. Maggie could never let Pat or any of her other colleagues see it. Instead, Pat, along with each and every visitor, was left to view the empty picture frame . . . and wonder.

Pat's wife had come the closest to divining its meaning. In fact, Maggie had overheard her describe Maggie as a “distraction” for her husband when Maggie first arrived in Qatar. Pat's wife never spoke to Maggie directly and, for her first week on the job, she hadn't spoken to her husband much either. Pat had attributed his wife's behavior to her pregnancy and the accompanying mood swings she seemed to have. That was not true. Maggie knew that it scared her to death that her husband spent days in the close quarters of a small office with a young, attractive woman.

Since childhood, Maggie had been slender and olive-skinned. When she visited her grandfather's cattle farm, they had called her an
abolengo
, after the land-rich elite descended from the first Spanish to arrive in Colombia. All this, along with her deep green eyes, she had gotten from her mother.

From her father, a lifelong career diplomat, Maggie had inherited only his strong-willed stubbornness and Irish name. O'Donald was not her true birth name. Her birth certificate said Mary Louise O'Neil. Like O'Donald, it was Irish, but like all at the Agency she had an acquired name, and the name she was known as was Margaret O'Donald. She had used O'Donald so long that sometimes she had forgotten that it was not her name at birth. Since the death of her parents, she seldom visited the thought of her birth name. She didn't forget, however, her father's Irish will. She was known to be intractable, but despite her stubbornness, she had inherited a very bright mind. And hopefully, she thought, the judgment needed to handle this e-mail from Riyadh.

I can't forward this just yet
.

It would eventually be classified as “top secret: for the eyes of only those who needed to know.” She felt the thumping beat of her heart. The chess game had risen to a new level.

Lately, she'd come to suspect that she was being fed information for some purpose beyond what she could immediately see. Over the course of only six months in the field, three of them in the Gulf, she had developed a top-level source in the House of Saud. It all seemed too easy, especially now.

The light in the room began to change yet again. Maggie looked up to see Pat's face darkening in the gloom. A wall of opaque light approached the urban sprawl of Doha, its movement visible now. Sandstorms came that quickly in Qatar.

“It's gonna shut this little city down,” Pat sighed from the window. “Hey, I've got something to show you.”

Maggie looked up from her desk.

“You remember the reception at the Radisson.”

She nodded. “The one for the alumni of Michigan.”

“Right.” He walked over to her desk with his cell phone. “I took a photo of the Michigan people as they left. I caught this in the background.”

A group of people dressed in tuxes and evening gowns were crowded together next to a Mercedes limo.

She looked. “So?”

“Look in the background.”

A tall figure was standing next to a small white car.

“And?”

“Something about him struck me.”

“Like what?”

“Like he was looking at me.” He paused. “Or you.”

“You know the drill.”

He was the security officer for the station.

“I'm going to send it in and let them run it.” Pat walked back to the window, his mind back on the approaching dust storm. It was getting darker.

Still undecided about the e-mail, Maggie rose and crossed the small room. She would say nothing of the e-mail, nor would she forward it to Langley. Not yet. If it turned out to be false, her next assignment might be Guam.

She took a peek through the office's other window. The thick, green-tinted, bulletproof Plexiglas offered only a limited view of the embassy's courtyard and, beyond, the soccer field. The field, she'd learned, had been intended not so much for sport as for its alternate role if the need arose—a helicopter landing zone.

“Is your car in the garage?” Pat asked.

“Oh, yeah.” She wouldn't make that mistake again. “After last time—”

A flash of brilliant light came through both windows, and an explosion followed that rocked the building like a sonic boom. It sounded more like a deafening thud than a crack, as if the winds had muffled the sound in some strange way. Book, magazines, and files tumbled to the floor as the bomb's concussion wave passed through the building.

Pat lurched back to the window. “What the hell was that?”

Maggie ran over to the window on his side of the embassy and peered over his shoulder. The sandstorm continued to rage outside.

“They must have used the storm to camouflage the attack,” she said as alarms began to sound throughout the building. The red light from the staircase just outside the door began to flash continuously.

“God, it may not be over.”

“You get the door,” Maggie barked to Pat, who strode across the room and swung the vault door closed. It could be closed and locked from both sides. Pat turned the wheel, spinning the locks.

Maggie ran to her desk. In an instant she inserted a USB flash drive, which asked for a password. She typed in the only one that she knew he would think of. Then she hit the Delete System button on her computer. As if a flashbulb exploded, the screen on her computer went blank. Next, she pulled away the backing of her empty picture frame and slid the small flash drive inside. Putting the mat and backing back in place, she took the .40-caliber Glock from her drawer and joined Pat back at his window. He glanced at her, then the gun.

In the year she had been posted with the Agency, she had never taken out the Glock. She didn't need the practice. Maggie's grandfather had taught her to shoot pistols from a very early age on his ranch.

“It must have been a smaller bomb to blow the fence,” he said loudly over the blare of the alarm.

“If that's true, the next one will come at us right out of that storm,” Maggie shouted back.

Pat turned and stepped toward his desk. Maggie saw him reach for the small photo of his family.

A movement out of the corner of her eye brought her back to the window. Two figures ran across the courtyard, each with a weapon of some kind. The sound of random firing from a machine gun carried from the soccer field on the north side of the embassy compound.

Maggie watched a cement truck emerge out of the darkness and head directly for the embassy's main building. It seemed impossible, but the boy driving the truck seemed barely able to peek over the steering wheel.

“Oh, God.”

The flash blinded her like a direct glimpse of the sun. And then everything went pitch-black.