He spoke not as a zealot but almost like a corporate president outlining growth projections for his company.

“You don’t need to do this.” Fiona found herself pleading.

“It’s too late to stop.” He pulled the kaffiyeh from down below his chin. Fiona had to will herself not to faint when she saw his face. “And your death will be the first strike.”

FOURTEEN

NO SOONER HAD LINC GOTTEN BEHIND THE WHEEL OF THE Pig and fired the engine than Mark Murphy opened the truck’s voice-activated communications system.

“Call Max.”

The ringing of a telephone sounded inside the off-road vehicle. The Pig was so well built, they could barely hear the engine as Linc guided the truck out of its hiding place and pointed its blunt snout toward the Tunisian border.

A voice no one recognized answered the call. “Max’s Pizza. Is this for pickup or delivery?”

“Be something if they would deliver,” Linc said. “I could go for a slice.”

“Sorry. Wrong number.” Mark cut the connection and tried again. “Call Max Hanley.”

This time Max’s voice muttered hello when the phone was answered.

“Max, it’s Mark Murphy. I’m in the Pig with Linda and Linc.”

“Glad you finally called,” Max said. “The stuff ’s hit the fan since you went dark.”

“I can imagine. Are you in the op center?”

“Yeah.”

“Have someone pull up the screen for the bio tracking chips.”

“Just a second.” There was a moment’s pause. While they waited, Mark used the Pig’s computer to jack into the Oregon’s closed-circuit television system so the image of the futuristic control room popped up on his screen. Max was standing next to the communications station, watching over the duty officer’s shoulder.

“That’s interesting,” Hanley muttered. “I have the three of you heading west at forty miles per hour, presumably in the Powered Investigator Ground, while the Chairman is going northeast at a hundred miles an hour. What happened, you guys get into an argument?”

“Funny. Make sure you stay on him. We’re on our way to the Tunisian border. Juan’s with the people we’re certain brought down the Secretary’s plane. We don’t believe she’s dead.”

“Did you say the plane was brought down?”

“I did, and I don’t think Fiona Katamora was on it when it crashed.”

“How the hell did they pull that off? Tell me in a second. You’d better hightail it out of there. Twenty minutes ago, the Libyans announced that they’ve located the wreckage, and their government has given permission for a team from our NTSB to examine it. They had been prestaged in Cairo and will be in Tripoli by noon, but I’m sure the Libyans will be swarming that area sooner.”

“They’re not going to find anything,” Mark told him. “A team of men came in on a chopper to demolish the site and ruin any chance of a reconstruction. They moved wreckage around, took some away, and smashed up just about everything they could lay their hands on. They even brought a lame camel to lay tracks all over the place.”

“A lame camel?”

“To make it look like nomads had done the damage,” Mark explained.

“Someone’s thinking a couple of steps ahead,” Max grunted.

“Is the NTSB coming to Libya general knowledge?” Linda asked.

“No. Langston told me it was cleared at the highest levels and kept under wraps.”

“That means the tangos have a source in the government if they knew to come back and mess with the wreckage.”

“Or they’re government sponsored,” Max countered. “Mark, you said you don’t think Secretary Katamora was on the plane.”

“There’s pretty convincing evidence that the plane landed in the desert before the crash.”

“You think they took her off?”

“Why else would they land it, take off again, and slam it into a mountaintop? They want the world to think she’s dead.”

“What do they gain by that?”

“Come on, Max,” Linda said. “She’s the damned Secretary of State. She’s either an intelligence coup for these people or the best bargaining chip in history. Remember, she was the last President’s National Security Advisor. If we think she’s dead, we aren’t going to be looking for her. They could extract information from now until doomsday and we’d never be the wiser.”

There was a pause in the conversation as all of them digested the implications of Linda’s theory. The terrorists getting their hands on Fiona Katamora was probably more damaging than if they had kidnapped the President. As a politician only in his first year of office, he was kept away from the operational minutia that went into fighting the war on terror. Because of the positions she’d held over the years, and the insatiable ability of her mind to absorb details, Fiona knew more about America’s ongoing operations and the nation’s plans for the future than the Chief Executive.

“We have to get her back,” Max said.

There was no need to respond to such an obvious statement.

“Is there anything else going on that we need to be aware of?” Mark asked.

“Yeah. Langston forwarded information about a mission on behalf of the State Department being carried out in Tunisia very close to the Libyan border.”

“State’s running ops now?” Linc asked.

“It was cleared through Langley, and they sent a minder along with the team. It was given medium priority because there wasn’t much of a chance for success.”

“What are they doing in Tunisia?”

Max explained about the letter that first came to light through St. Julian Perlmutter and how it related to the historic pirate Suleiman Al-Jama during the Barbary Wars. He told them of the belief that the old corsair might have left writings in a hidden cave someplace along a dried-up river course that expounded on ways Islam and Christendom could coexist peacefully.

“Does sound like a long shot,” Linda said when he finished. “Is this connected to the plane crash?”

“It’s kind of coincidental that these two events happened around the same time and near the same place, but there’s no hard evidence of a link. The Secretary wasn’t even aware of the expedition. It was handled by an Undersecretary named Christie Valero. Apparently, she thought it was worth trying for. And for whatever it’s worth, so do I. Pronouncements from influential clerics carry a tremendous amount of weight in the region. It was the Ayatollah Khomeini who declared that anyone who—”

“ ‘—commits an act of suicide while engaged with the enemy shall be considered a martyr,’ ” Linda finished for him. “We know our history, Max. And I’m willing to bet you just learned that little factoid when you spoke with Overholt.”

Hanley didn’t deny it. “Anyway, three of the four people State sent to Tunisia are now considered missing. They had been given permission by the local government chaperone to stay away from the camp for seventy-two hours, but their truck’s overdue.”

“The supposition at Langley is that this is connected to Fiona’s abduction, right?” Mark asked doubtfully.

“They’re not supposing anything,” Max replied with a tone that said he didn’t give a whit for Mark’s skepticism. “But Lang wants us to check it out anyway.”

Linda said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We just saw Juan fly off with either a group of terrorists or members of Libya’s Special Forces, but either way they’re involved in the crash. We shouldn’t be traipsing across the desert searching for lost archaeologists when he could need us at a moment’s notice.”

“Hold on a second,” Murph interrupted, a hint of excitement in his voice. “Where’s Stoney?”

“He’s not on duty right now so he’s probably in his cabin.”

“Max, pipe this call down to him, and we’ll be right back.” Max made the switch. Eric Stone came up on a webcam a moment later, slurping from an energy drink. “Hey, how is it playing Lawrence of Arabia?” he said in greeting.

“Are you bogarting my Red Bull?” Murph accused.

Eric quickly pulled the can out of camera range. “Nope.”