Читать книгу The Crimson Code - Rachel Lee - Страница 7

Rome, Italy

Renate Bächle had dragged Lawton Caine to Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. How she had gained the coveted tickets to hear the pope serve one of the two most beautiful Masses of the year, she would not say. She had merely given him a look from those icy blue eyes of hers that these days sometimes even held a twinkle. They had twinkled when he asked.

Lawton Caine, formerly Tom Lawton of the FBI, now a dead man with a new identity working for the U.N.’s ultrasecret Office 119, would ordinarily have skipped Mass entirely. He was a lapsed Catholic who liked being lapsed.

But this Midnight Mass…it was unlike any he had ever attended. There was no sense of urgency, no sense that a schedule must be met, no tired children longing for their beds and keeping parents preoccupied.

No, this had been a Mass devoted to true spirituality. Every moment had been treated as if it were the end in itself. Dignitaries from all over the world had shared in the solemnity and celebration, and Tom had walked out of the Basilica feeling as if he had for the very first time come in contact with the core of his Catholic faith. As if for that brief period he had stepped out of time into eternity.

In short, he’d been wowed.

Renate, too, had been wowed. For those moments, she had allowed herself to feel something she hadn’t felt in a long time: vulnerable. She had opened herself to the miracle that the Mass was supposed to be. Of course, that vulnerability couldn’t last long. Vulnerability seemed to be something she had virtually erased from her nature.

But after the Mass, she had mentioned to Lawton that she missed home and the Weihnachtsmärkte, the traditional Christmas markets set up in every German city and town. She let her thoughts drift back to memories of those festive squares, decorated with holiday lights, where carols, laughter and Glühwein flowed in equal measure. To his surprise, she had carried him away with her into the city of Rome, to a small German restaurant that was open all night. There they drank the traditional hot spiced wine, joined in the carols and ate bratwurst that, if it could not take the whole of her back home, could at least take her taste buds there.

Tom, she knew, was missing Miriam Anson and Terry Tyson, friends from his previous life with the American FBI and the closest thing he had to family. She hoped that the restaurant gave him at least some sense of a home.

They left at five in the morning and wandered the darkened streets of Rome, taking in the age of the place, the history that seemed to fill even the air. They spent some time at the Trevi Fountain, shivering in the cool air, receiving a blessing from a passing monsignor who paused to smile at them—probably thinking they were lovers. He made a swift sign of the cross over them, murmuring the Latin words: In nomine Patris, Filii et Spiritu Sancti.

Magical.

“Right about now,” Renate said, “my parents and the rest of my family are sitting in Mass back home.”

She rarely spoke of her family. She, too, was officially dead, as were all of the agents at Office 119. They were a small community of people without country, without family. Save for each other.

Tom reached out and squeezed her hand. She didn’t pull away.

All of a sudden, the magic shattered.

They heard a rumble and saw flames rise into the predawn sky. Almost at the same instant, both their pagers went off, hers with a shrill beeping, his with a demanding buzz.

They exchanged worried looks and hailed the first cab they could find. Renate slammed the door on vulnerability. It was time to work.

“The bombs exploded within minutes of each other,” the man they all called Jefe was saying. In his past life, Tom had known him as John Ortega, a fellow FBI agent. Now his name was unknown and unspoken. He was simply Jefe. Chief. “Midnight Mass in Boston. Early-morning Mass in Baden-Baden, and here in Rome. Noon Mass in Jakarta. All were timed for fifteen minutes after the hour. I guess they didn’t want to miss the late arrivals.”

“Baden-Baden.”

Renate whispered the name. Her face went from rosy to ashen in a single instant.

Jefe paused, his attention drawn from the other agents to Renate. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“My…family,” she said, breaking the unwritten code of silence about such things, a code enforced by the desire to protect loved ones left behind.

Color returned to Renate’s face, but it was not the glow of earlier that morning. Whatever warmth she had felt then was freezing now into a cold, killing resolve.

Tom met her eyes and pressed her shoulder. “Take it easy, Renate. You can’t do a damn thing right now.”

“Yeah,” said the chief. “Besides, the info is still scattered. We don’t know anything for sure yet.”

Renate’s eyes fixed on the chief. “My entire family was at the six o’clock Mass in Baden-Baden.”

From outside, the endless wail of sirens could still be faintly heard.

Intel continued to come in to the office, but it remained sparse for hours. The chaos in each stricken city was such that little information was being sent out of the affected areas. Everyone was too busy dealing with the death and destruction.

A huge rear-projection screen displayed a world map, political boundaries in blue, continents outlined in green. As the morning progressed, red dots appeared by more and more cities, as reports came in.

Large television sets built into another wall were tuned to CNN International, Al Jazeera and other European, Asian and American networks. Pictures of destruction began arriving, but little was actually known.

Eventually the news began to identify other targets: a North Sea drilling rig, a pipeline in Turkey, nuclear weapons assembly plants in New Mexico and Kiev and the computer files of the New York Stock Exchange.

Despite the other targets, the chaotic map soon told a horrifying story. There was no question that the Catholic Church was a primary target of this terrorism. Along with the other targets, a major cathedral had been destroyed in each time zone. The only exception was Baden-Baden, where the target had been a simple family parish in the foothills of the Schwarzwald.

“And Baden-Baden doesn’t fit,” Tom said, looking at the map. “Why two churches in the same time zone? Why not another cathedral? Why not Köln, or Notre Dame in Paris?”

“None of it fits,” Jefe said, reading from a computer screen. “The initial reports say no one was injured in the attacks on economic targets. The workers on that North Sea rig say they were given time to evacuate before the rig was blown. And yet they blow up churches with thousands of innocent worshippers. It doesn’t make sense.”

As he spoke another light winked on, this one in South America. Brazil. Rio.

“Maybe they hit Baden-Baden because there was extra security in Paris and Cologne,” Margarite Renault said, her English accented by her French background. A former member of the Sûreté, she was around forty, with classic Gallic features, dark hair and eyes. “The European nations have beefed up their antiterrorist activities. Maybe Baden-Baden was a target of opportunity.”

Renate could listen no longer. She knew what had been done—and why. There was no reason to dance around the issue. Justice demanded honesty. “It wasn’t a target of opportunity. They murdered my family. They couldn’t find me, so they murdered my family.”

A half hour later, Margarite found Tom in a side cubicle. She lowered her voice so she could not be overheard. “I am worried about Renate. She is always so controlled, but this…” A shrug. “This she cannot control. It has happened. Now she must—how you say?—deal with it.”

Tom nodded slowly. He was more worried about Renate than he wanted to admit. If her entire family had been in the church that had been blown up, he didn’t have to guess how she would react. She was tough and disciplined, but the cold, hard look in her eyes left no doubt where her thoughts were running.

His heart would not allow him to leave her alone in her shock and rage. He entered her office and sat in the chair beside her desk. “Renate.”

She ignored him, tapping away at her keyboard.

“Renate.”

Slowly she looked up. He wanted to see emotion in her eyes. Any emotion, even anger. All he saw was the icy coldness of a lifeless glacier. “I’m working.”

“You’re not working,” he dared to say, then plunged on before she could argue. “You’re looking for revenge.”

Something sparked then in those cold blue eyes. “Don’t I deserve it?”

“You don’t know anything for sure.”

With a swift gesture, she turned her flat-panel monitor toward him. “You see? My family’s kirche. It’s on the list. They are dead.”

He felt his heart crack for her. “Maybe…”

“No maybe. Don’t tell me maybe. I know.” For the briefest instant, a fathomless grief broke through, crumpling her face. Then it was gone, so fast he wasn’t sure he had seen it.

“Just remember our mission,” he said. “Our mission, Renate. Don’t forget who we are. We are not them.”

“They are animals,” she said coldly. “And I am going to kill the ones who hurt my family. I am going to kill them with my own hands.”

“Renate.”

But she had turned away, pulling her monitor back and resuming her online hunt for information.

Oddly, he found himself thinking of Midnight Mass again, and offering a silent prayer that Renate’s family had for some reason not been in that church. But as he turned away and glimpsed the horrific images that were now filling all the TV screens, he decided that God was probably not in a very good mood today. In fact, God was probably not listening at all.

By late afternoon, figures were arriving. None held the mind-numbing counts that had come from the tsunami in the Indian Ocean the previous Christmas, but though the numbers were smaller, the details were just as horrifying. These bombings had not been an act of God. As the acts of men, they were heinous beyond belief, worse even than the Twin Towers in scope. “Black Christmas,” as the networks had begun to call it, would undoubtedly go into the annals of history along with 9/11.

Renate sat at her desk, her demeanor a cloak of ice, as if she had frozen every feeling. Tom checked on her frequently, but she never looked up, choosing instead to keep working at the computer, seeking backdoor information.

They were all doing the same. They all had informants, covert contacts in their old agencies, a collective net cast around the world. Weeks ago they had begun to detect signs that a major terrorist operation was in the works, but they had been unable to pin it down. Equally ominous, no one was claiming responsibility. Usually terrorists were all too eager to step forward and thumb their noses at the world.

Silence reigned. From the dust and the fire came only the cries of victims.

So far, heads of state had been quiet, as if awaiting information before speaking. Only the pope had released a brief message, speaking of martyrdom, grief, consolation and forgiveness.

Forgiveness. Tom doubted that there would be much of that for a while.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Betrayal.

Ahmed Ahsami curled his fists in anger as he watched the reports on three television screens. The BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera were unanimous in their focus on the cathedral bombings, with the other work—the real work, carried out by real soldiers—given only a passing mention. He felt the anger burn in his belly like a white-hot flame.

Betrayed.

He never should have trusted them. Fanatics could not advance the cause of Islam. But he had made a deal with the devil, and the devil would have his due.

Three years of careful planning had been turned to dust, and worse, in the past twelve hours. Three years of arguing, cajoling, convincing his Islamic brothers that they would have to walk a new path if ever they wanted true peace and freedom. Three years of reconnaissance, recruiting, training and more training, to create a network of special operations teams truly worthy of the banner of Allah. Three years directed toward a single goal, a day that would mark forever the ascendance of Islam as a major military and political power.

Betrayed.

On a desk beside him sat a DVD, a DVD the world would never see. It was to have been delivered to the offices of Al Jazeera two hours ago. By now the world would have known the name of Saif Alsharaawi…the Sword of the East. By now the world would have seen the face of Ahmed Ahsami, the face of moderation and determination, every word in his speech carefully crafted.

True justice, true peace, cannot be bought with the blood of innocents…. Islam, like its cousins Christianity and Judaism, deplores the taking of innocent life…. We have shown that we can strike legitimate military and economic targets anywhere, at any time, and that we can do so with justice in our hearts and Allah on our lips…. We ask only that the West leave the Islamic people to govern ourselves, by our own beliefs and our own standards, to pursue our own dreams with the guidance of Allah….

The speech was to have been an olive branch, offered up with the sincerity of a people who had received too much injustice and renounced delivering more. The days of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, of suicide bombings intended to cause the greatest possible loss of life, were past. Islam could not stand with its feet in a pool of blood. If he and his brothers were to win this war of ideas, they would have to do so by complying with the true will of Allah…and the laws of war.

These were the arguments he had made again and again, as he had risen to the top ranks of Saif Alsharaawi. He had personally approved every target, vetting each for military legitimacy. Oil rigs and pipelines, the nuclear weapons plants, the New York Stock Exchange—the heart of Western materialism—all of those, and the other targets he had intended to strike, were selected after careful evaluation.

The forces of Islam could not match the West in terms of nuclear weapons, guided missiles, aircraft or warships. Ahmed knew that and accepted it. Indeed, he had decided to make that mismatch a cornerstone of his planning. For while he might lack high-tech hardware, he could more than match his opponent in special operations forces: carefully selected, highly trained, highly disciplined and highly motivated. They would be Saif Alsharaawi, the Sword of the East, a surgical strike weapon capable of winning military victory without sacrificing political or moral legitimacy.

But he had not had enough strike teams for today’s attacks, and so he had made and forged what was to have been an alliance of mutual gain. And his allies had betrayed him.

Worse, they had betrayed Islam. For as efficient as his teams had been, the bombings of the cathedrals had wiped out any possibility of moderation. And the West would strike back not at his allies, but at Islam. The senseless bombing of churches would accomplish nothing except to continue and intensify the Fourth Crusade already being waged against his people.

Ahmed knew what he had to do. And once his anger had passed, he would find a way to do exactly that.

He would turn their betrayal against them.