Shaking his head, he went to the computer. It was an American-made Dell with an Internet Explorer browser open to an odd porn site: it featured a virtual game where the characters were in the process of disrobing each other.

There were several other tabs open. One was for what looked like a news site in Tehran; the lettering was Persian, and he had no idea what it said. Turk clicked on the video player at the middle of the page and footage of a desert began to play—it appeared to be a report on the “earthquake” that had struck Natanz.

The footage showed rows of demolished houses. He stared at them for a few moments, amazed at the damage, wondering if it was real.

“That’s Badroud,” said Gorud, coming into the room behind him. “They didn’t know they were sitting on an atomic bomb. Excuse me.” After gently pushing Turk aside, he took the mouse and started fiddling with the browser, first checking the history and then opening the Favorites folder.

“You can read this?” Turk asked him.

“You think I’d be here if I couldn’t?” Gorud frowned at him. “I want to make sure they didn’t get an alert out,” he added, his voice less antagonistic. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“Do they know what happened?” Turk asked.

“The news, at least, believes it’s an earthquake.” Gorud straightened. “Or that’s what they say. Come on. We gotta go.”

He pulled the wires from the back without turning the machine off. Granderson and the others were already outside. They’d found plasma and were treating Tiny. Turk peeked into the back and saw the soldier lying comatose, his skin so pale it looked like a sheet of paper. He was about to ask if the man would make it but thought better of it.

“We better get moving,” said Granderson, hopping off the back. “Let’s go.”

The pickup went first, driving out of the compound and back to the helicopter rendezvous point. There, some of them changed out of their uniforms, with Turk and Grease putting on a set of civilian clothes that had been found in one of the rooms. They were tight on Grease, loose on Turk. Then the team rearranged themselves in the vehicles—the Israeli in the car with Grease and Turk, who went back to posing as Russians; the captain and Green in the pickup, with their hired bodyguards, Gorud, and the others in the truck, in theory their Iranian escort.

“How you doing back there?” asked Grease from the front seat.

“I’m good.” Turk was alone in the back.

“You’re so quiet, I thought you were sleeping.”

“No.”

“You might try. You’re going to be awake all night. And you have to be alert.”

“I’ll be all right. This area we’re driving through,” he said to the Israeli, “what are the people here like?”

“Iranians.”

Grease scoffed.

“That much I knew,” said Turk.

“They live at the edge of the desert. They scrape by,” said the Israeli. “If you think too much about them, you’ll have trouble doing your job.”

The comment effectively ended Turk’s try at conversation. He slumped back in the seat.

How many people had died in the nuclear explosion, or been buried by the resulting tremors? It was the Iranian leaders’ fault, he told himself, not theirs, and certainly not his. If anything, he had saved thousands, millions. Destroying the weapon meant it couldn’t be used, and even the crudest math would easily show that the damage here was far less than if the weapon had been.

But though he didn’t feel guilt, exactly, Turk felt unsettled. He was uneasy—uneasy with the way the world was, unsettled by reality. In a perfect world, no one would kill, no one would threaten to exterminate a race. It was disappointing to be reminded that the world was far less than perfect.

“Farmers,” muttered Grease. “Right side.”

Turk leaned back against the seat, watching from the lower corner of the window as they passed. Two men were doing something to a tractor; they didn’t look up as the trucks passed.

A few miles later they turned westward, following a road that was little more than a trail down the side of a ridge. Probably flooded with water during the rainy season, he thought, when the rare but heavy rain washed through the area, the road now dry and wide. Its surface consisted almost entirely of small stones and pebbles, but the dirt below was soft.

Before long they started bogging down. The Israeli tried to compensate by building his momentum, but the car refused to cooperate, sliding to one side and then the other as he struggled to keep it under control. Then they spun around in a 360, jerking to a stop when the front wheels slid into a deep layer of soft sand.

The Israeli began cursing in Russian. Turk, a little dizzy, got out and fell to the ground, tripping in the loose dirt. Grease pulled him up.

The pickup stopped a short distance away, the troop truck stopping right behind it.

“We’re going to have to push it out,” said Grease as Granderson and Gorud ran up. “Going to have to push it this way.”

“If it will come loose,” said the Israeli.

“The question is whether we can get it any farther,” said Granderson, looking down the path in the direction they were to take. “Nothing that way looks much better than this stretch.”

Most of the men had gotten out of the truck to stretch their legs. Turk walked over and leaned in the back. “How’s Tiny?” he asked.

Dread looked at him but said nothing.

Turk understood what that meant. He put his lips together. “How’s your shoulder?” he asked.

“It’s OK.”

“We’ll get home soon,” offered Turk.

“Yeah.”

A few awkward moments passed. Turk felt as if he should be able to offer something to the others, consolation or something. He felt responsible for Tiny. He’d been killed protecting him, after all. But there was nothing to say, nothing that wouldn’t sound bizarrely stupid.

He asked Dread for water, but the trooper was listening to something else.

“Truck,” he said, grabbing his pistol with his good hand. “Couple of them.”

A funnel of dust appeared down the ridge.

Grease was staring at the vehicles when Turk reached him.

“Three Kaviran tactical vehicles, and a pair of two-and-a-half-ton trucks,” Grease told him. The Kaviran were Iranian Land Rover knockoffs. “Two miles off, maybe a little more. They’re coming right up this way.”

12

Washington, D.C.

ZEN STARED AT THE NUMBER ON HIS BLACKBERRY phone. It looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it or the name above: DR. GROD.

He looked up from his seat in the stadium box. The National Anthem was still about five minutes off.

What the hell.

“Excuse me,” he told his guests, a pair of junior congressmen from Florida who had supported one of his bills in the House. “I guess I should take this. It’s on my personal line.”

He wheeled himself back a few feet and hit the talk button.

“This is Zen.”

“Senator Stockard?”

“This is Zen. What can I do for you?”

“It’s Gerry Rodriguez from the Vegas clinic. Remember me from Dreamland? I know it’s been a while.”

“Gerry.” Zen closed his eyes, trying to associate the name with Dreamland.

“I had interviewed you as a follow-up to the experiments that followed, well, what the press ended up calling the ‘nerve center experiments.’ The cell regeneration group.”

“Right, right, right.” The experiments he remembered; Gerry he didn’t.

“You asked if I ever came up with anything . . . about regenerating the spinal tissue. If there was a project—”

“Sure.” Zen glanced toward the front of his box. The two congressmen were rising; the National Anthem was about to begin.

“I’m going to be in Washington tomorrow, as it happens. And I’d like to talk to you. If, uh, we could arrange it. I know your schedule is pretty tight, but—”