Raven Strike

Melissa locked up everything, then paused at the door. She didn’t have a mirror; all she could do was glance down at her clothes.

Frumpy. But that was the best she was going to manage. She pulled open the door, locked it behind her, and started down toward the Mercedes. No one was standing near it, and her first thought was that she wasn’t late at all. Then she realized that both Da

She started to run.

“About time you got here,” said Nuri as she pulled open the door. He started the car and put it in gear, not waiting for her to buckle her seat belt.

“Go

“San Francisco,” Melissa said.

Nuri felt his cheeks burning as the two began a trivial conversation about their backgrounds.

The problem was that she was good-looking. If she’d been ugly—or better, if she’d been a guy—Da

Granted, she might be useful at the clinic. Maybe.

Nuri’s foul mood settled over him as he drove. About two miles from the border, he went off the main road to bypass the guards at the main crossing, using a trail he’d spotted from the satellite photos. It was clearly well traveled—though dirt, it was hard packed, and even doing fifty, the Mercedes raised little dust. Within an hour, they were approaching Duka.

“We’re going to switch, right?” asked Da

“Right,” said Nuri, feeling a little foolish. He took his foot off the gas and coasted to a stop. “Thanks. I forgot.”

Chapter 21

Washington, D.C.

If the Agency was ru

The ends of the earth, and beyond.

The first step from the director’s dining room felt like liberation to Reid; he knew what he had to do, and there was power in that certainty.

But with every step that followed, doubt crept in, then paranoia.

Would Edmund order he be detained? Or even killed?

It was a ridiculous idea, Reid told himself. Even if they hadn’t been friends, Edmund would never do such a thing. Nor would any director. He was sure of it.

And yet, he couldn’t seem to shake the paranoia. It intensified as the day went on, until it began to feel like a hood over his head, furrowing his vision and pushing him physically closer to the ground. Reid spent the afternoon in Room 4, studying more of the data, reviewing everything that might be even tangentially related to Raven.

That alone would have stoked his fears—the more he learned about the class of programs, the more he realized Raven was potentially unstoppable. “Killer viruses,” declared a paper written by an Australian researcher. The man foresaw a cyber war that would paralyze the world inside of five minutes.

A little past 4:00 P.M. the phone system alerted Reid to a call from the Senate Office Building. Thinking it was Brea

“Mr. Reid, can you hold for the senator?” asked the secretary.

Reid hesitated for a moment. Gunter was a member of the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee, but Reid barely knew him.

But of course he had to be polite. “Surely.”

“Jonathon, how are you?” said Gunter, coming on the line.

“I’m fine, Senator. Yourself?”

“Very good, very good. I wanted to speak to you in confidence. Is that possible?”

“I’m at your disposal, Senator,” said Reid.

“You know, between you and I, George Napoli is retiring from the DIA in a few months,” said Gunter.

“I hadn’t heard that.” Napoli was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“In some quarters, your name has been raised,” said Gunter.

Reid realized immediately what was going on—he was being bought off. He wondered—did Gunter know about the operation, or was Edmund using him?

Surely the latter.

“Interesting,” said Reid.

“Is that the sort of post . . . you’d be interested in?”

“I hadn’t really given the matter any thought,” said Reid. It was best to be noncommittal—it might draw more information from Gunter. “I hadn’t known it was even coming open.”

“Well it is. And a lot of people think highly of you. On both sides of the aisle. I believe the President could be persuaded,” said Gunter.

“It is an interesting opportunity,” said Reid. “Who— Are there people putting my name forward?”

“I’ve heard in several places,” said Gunter, so breezily it was clearly a lie.

“I don’t know if I would have support,” said Reid. “I don’t know the members of the Intelligence Committee very well.”

“This will go through my committee, Defense,” said Gunter.

“I see. But even inside the CIA there might be people opposed.”

“I wouldn’t worry about a problem from that quarter. Perhaps we should have lunch.”

“I’d love to,” said Reid. It was a lie, of course; he’d sooner lay down across traffic on the Beltway. “When were you thinking?”

“I’ll have my secretary check the schedule and give you some dates.”

Reid’s first reaction as he put the phone down was relief: Edmund clearly had decided to try to buy him off. This meant his paranoia was completely unjustified—you didn’t try to kill someone you were bribing.

But once contracted, paranoia is a difficult disease to shake. He began thinking that it could every easily be a ploy to make him drop his guard. And the more he told himself that he was being ridiculous, even silly, the more the idea stuck.

He finally decided that he had to talk to the President as soon as possible, if only to retain his own sanity.

Even a longtime friend like Jonathon Reid couldn’t just show up at the White House and expect the President to see him. Christine Mary Todd was far too busy for that. Most evenings she spent away from the White House, at receptions or in meetings. And getting a formal appointment without giving the reason to the chief of staff could take days, if not weeks.

Getting in to see her husband, on the other hand, was far less onerous.

At precisely five after five Reid left his office to go to his car. He took a deep breath before stepping out of the elevator, assuring himself there was no reason to be so paranoid, and that if there was a reason, he would face his fate with equanimity and honor.

There was an unexpected thrill in that—a sense of the old excitement he had felt as a field officer so many years before.

But he had an old man’s heart now. Just walking to the car nearly exhausted him.

As Reid put his key into the ignition, he thought how easy it would be to attach a bomb to the wires, how quickly he would go.

There was no bomb; there was no plot; there was nothing but his paranoia. As far as he could tell, he wasn’t followed from the lot, nor on the local roads as he wended his way across town.

But his caution didn’t fade. Reid drove to the Metro and crisscrossed his way around the capital, changing trains willy-nilly amid the rush-hour throng.

He came up at the Mall and walked to the Smithsonian. Inside, he found one of the few pay phones left in the city, and called Daniel Todd’s private cell phone.

“Da

“Jon—I almost didn’t answer. Where are you?”

“Knocking around in the city—it’s a long story. What are you doing?”