HERA FOLLOWED DANNY TO THE STONE WALL BEHIND THE building, jumping over and hitting the dirt.

Danny waited for her to catch her breath, then began retracing their steps back through the field to the edge of the woods, not stopping until they reached the stepladder.

“Let me get my bearings,” he told her. “Hold on just a minute.”

ABERHADJI FELT THE PICKAX STAB HIS TEMPLES AGAIN, cleaving his head in two. The pain had never been this intense—it dropped him to the floor. There was complete agony for a minute, for two full minutes; everything was pain as all other sensations bleached away from him. He couldn’t see; he didn’t know how to see. He struggled to breathe.

Gradually he became aware of the room. The migraine lessened somewhat, the blades retracting a few inches. The room, invisible to him at the height of the attack, shaded from black to a dark brown, then lightened slowly to sepia.

The pain strangled the back of his neck, paralyzed his shoulders. He tried pushing himself to get up but could not.

Aberhadji had never believed the headaches were a sign or a curse from Allah; he had always accepted them as part of his self, a flaw in his biology, not his spirit. His view did not change now. His faith was unshaken, not just in God, but in his view of the universe, of the way things worked, and must work.

But the headache nonetheless revealed one great truth to him: He would never survive another attack. Even if the next was merely as bad as this one—if they continued to increase exponentially, as they had over these past weeks, he simply could not survive.

Logically, then, it was time to initiate the plan. Israel had just bombed his plant—there could be no other place where their jets would go in Sudan.

Very possibly more fighters were on their way here.

The Zionists must be destroyed, and the traitor president killed.

This was not so much a decision as a realization, and it eased Aberhadji’s pain substantially. Though his head continued to pound, he was able to stand up. Only then did he see that two men were standing at the door.

One was a truck driver, the other a Revolutionary Guard officer he had called to help supervise the truck loading.

“I slipped, but I am all right,” he told them.

They would proceed as planned, except that he would go with the warhead, and divert it at the last minute.

The brothers would be needed to mount it onto the missile and prepare the rocket, and he would have to stay with them to supervise, as well as code the warhead at the final preparation. This meant neither they nor he could bring the bomb to the man who would plant it aboard the plane.

Who did he trust to do that job?

No one.

Tarid?

But perhaps Tarid had been the one to give away the Sudan location to the Israelis.

No, if he had done that, he never would have come back to Iran.

Not purposely. Perhaps he had made a slip.

If he had done so inadvertently, while still a sin, it was at least less mortal. And he could make up for it by placing the bomb in the plane.

“Are you all right, Imam?” asked the Guard member.

“I needed a moment to gather my thoughts. The articles must be transported. Load them into the separate trucks. I will give each driver specific instructions once you are ready to leave. In the meantime, I must make a phone call in private.” He reached into his pocket and took out the key to the large warehouse-style door. “Go to the side and begin your work.”

“THEY’RE TRANSPORTING THE CRATES,” DANNY TOLD HERA as the Voice translated what Aberhadji told the men inside. “He got a phone call. They must realize we’re on to them.”

Danny looked at the MY-PID screen. There were a dozen trucks gathered in the front lot. Each crate had to be going to a different location. They’d lose track of half of them.

He debated whether to try attacking. Besides the drivers, there were another twenty men, all with visible weapons, according to the Voice.

There was no way.

And even if the odds were better, what would the next step be? Blow up whatever was in the crates? If it was nuclear material, it would be spread all over.

Then what? Gather it and smuggle it out of Iran.

But if they failed, everything would be lost—the Iranians would find the bugs, realize they were being watched. The material—and the bombs, if there were any—would be lost again.

“How many soldiers are there?” asked Hera.

“Too many,” said Danny, rising. “Come on. Let’s get back to the van. We’ll pick one of the trucks and follow it.”

65

Washington, D.C.

PRESIDENT TODD HAD JUST FINISHED SHAKING HANDS WITH the National Chamber of Commerce delegation when David Greenwich, her chief of staff, strode into the Oval Office. His lips were pursed, a signal that a serious problem was at hand.

Still, she kept her expression neutral. Her guests had come to press her on changes in the proposed universal health care bill. Not yet approved by Congress, it was the subject of intense lobbying. Everyone, it seemed, was for it—as long as it could be changed.

“The Israelis have just struck one of the sites Whiplash was looking at,” whispered Greenwich in her ear. “In the Sudan.”

“Thank you, David. You’re right. I guess I will have to take that call.” The President rose. “I will just be a few minutes,” she announced. “Relax for a moment—Peg will see to some coffee or tea.”

Todd smiled at them, nodded as they rose, then went with the chief of staff to the cloak room next to the Oval Office. Though called a cloakroom, as in many previous administrations it was used as a small getaway office by the President.

“What’s going on?” she asked as soon as the door was closed.

“There’s been an attack within the past fifteen minutes,” said Greenwich. “About a dozen Israeli jets came over the border into Sudan. They attacked two places, one of which we were watching. We’re still trying to round up information on the other.”

“How do we know this?”

“Our people were coming over the border when the planes passed. In addition, we’d put bugs in and around one of the targets. The raid was extremely well-planned—the Israeli planes weren’t detected at all. They must have flown right over Egypt, otherwise we could have picked them up. I’d guess they’ve been planning this for quite a while.”

“They must have been the ones who assassinated the Jasmine agent. This is part of the same operation.”

The chief of staff hadn’t made the connection yet. “Yes,” he said, nodding. As always, Greenwich was impressed not so much by his boss’s intelligence as by her ability to dive so deeply into the issue quickly.

“They should have told us,” he said. “If we’re allies.”

“That’s not the issue at the moment, David.” Most likely, the Israelis had learned their lesson during the previous administration, when the U.S. had all but vetoed an operation against Iran—and then blabbed about it a few months later. “Find out where Dr. Bacon is. I want to talk with him in twenty minutes. In person would be better than over the phone. Have Herman available as well. And Mr. Reid. I assume our friend Ms. Stockard is still away.”

“She’s the one who spotted the planes,” said Greenwich.

66

Tehran

TARID SPENT A MISERABLE AFTERNOON AND EVENING IN Tehran. While initially relieved that Bani Aberhadji did not suspect him of skimming, the fact that his leader felt the operation had been compromised was nearly as bad. While Tarid didn’t want to believe it could be true, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that everything that had happened since he met the arms dealer named Kirk could have been arranged to increase his confidence in him.