• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1325 0

and 1970s-they were effective, but they were mercenaries at heart however much they might protest their religious fervor and their loyalty to the new regime. They'd proceeded along conventional lines for the unconventional mission, trying bribes of various sorts or testing the waters for dissidents, only to fail at every turn, and for years Daryaei had wondered if the target of all that attention might have Allah's perverse blessings somehow or other-but that had been the counsel of despair, not of reason and faith, and even Daryaei was subject to human weakness. Surely the Americans had tried for him also, and probably in the same way, trying to identify military commanders who might like to try out the seat of power, trying to initiate a coup d'etat such as they had done often enough in other parts of the world. But, no, this target was too skilled for that, and at every turn he'd become more skilled, and so the Americans had failed, and the Israelis, and all the others. All but me.

It was tradition, after all, all the way back to antiquity. One man, operating alone, one faithful man who would do whatever was necessary to accomplish his mission. Eleven such men had been dispatched into Iraq for this specific purpose, told to go deep under cover, trained to forget everything they had ever been, entirely without contact or control officers, and all records of their existence destroyed so that even an Iraqi spy in his own agencies could not discover the mission without a name. Within an hour, some of his own cronies would come into this office, praising God and lauding their leader for his wisdom. Perhaps so, but even they didn't know all the things he had done, or all the people he'd dispatched.

THE DIGITIZED RENDITION of the event didn't change much, though now he had a more professional opinion of the options:

Mr. President, a guy with a Silicon Graphics workstation could fake this, the NIO told him. You've seen movies, and movie film has much higher resolution than a TV set. You can fake almost anything now.

Fine, but your job is to tell me what did happen, Ryan pointed out. He'd seen the same few seconds of tape eight times now, and was growing tired of instant replay.

We can't say with absolute certainty.

Maybe it was the week's sleep deprivation. Maybe it was the stress of the job. Maybe it was the stress of having to face his second crisis. Maybe it was the fact that Ryan was himself still a carded national intelligence officer. Look, I'm going to say this once: Your job isn't to cover your ass. Your job is to cover mine!

I know that, Mr. President. That's why I'm giving you all the information I have Ryan didn't have to listen to the rest of the speech. He'd heard it all before, a couple of hundred times. There had even been cases when he'd said similar things himself, but in Jack's case, he'd always hung his hat on one of the options.

Scott? Jack asked the acting SecState.

The son of a bitch is dead as yesterday's fish, Adler replied.

Disagreement? President Ryan asked the others in the room. Nobody contradicted the assessment, giving it a sort of blessing. Even the NIO would not disagree with the collective opinion. He'd delivered his assessments, after all. Any mistakes now were the Secretary of State's problem. Perfect.

Who was the shooter? Andrea Price asked. The answer came from CIA's Iraq-desk officer.

Unknown. I have people running tapes of previous appearances just to make sure that he's been around before. Look, from all appearances it was a senior member of his protection detail, with the rank of an army colonel, and-

And I damned well know everybody on my detail, Price concluded the statement. So, whoever it was, he belonged there, and that means whoever pulled this off managed to get somebody all the way inside, close enough to make the hit, and committed enough to pay the price for it. It must have taken years. The continuation of the tape-they'd watched that only five times-showed the man crumble after a cavalcade of pistol shots at point-blank range. That struck Agent Price as odd. You