Only the guilty paid for silence. After nearly two decades of searching out, recruiting or buying contacts and informants from the adversarial side, Robert Dutton knew few darker truths existed in the shadowy world of intelligence gathering. Wisdom, though, did little to calm the brewing tempest in his gut. And he suspected a storm—invisible, silent, murderous, and in the flesh—was on the way.

He cursed the static buzz in his ear, fear sweeping away the impulse to fling the cell phone across the study. Whoever was coming—and he had some notion, albeit vague, as to the identity of the opposition—had electronically severed the secured frequency to the American Embassy. The National Security Agency called it hot-wiring, their classified super-tech miniature boxes emitting laser or microwave beams through triangulation, once the source—or target operator—was identified. The interloper, however, had to be in a general proximity of fifty yards to pull off the black magic act, which told Dutton the compound had already been breached. Likewise, he found his computer screen streaked with lightning jags. He felt his guts clench with the bitter awareness that all communications to the outside world had shut down. With no chance to e-mail his wife, warn her of imminent danger, to stay put until he rounded her up.

Damn it!

Knowing there was no hope of any Marine cavalry storming the compound, he chambered a 9 mm Parabellum round into the Beretta M-9 and stowed the weapon in shoulder rigging. No, he told himself, it wasn’t entirely true he was alone. His three-man team was still in the Command and Control Room, all of them armed, all of them sure to be staring at monitors jumping haywire with countertech malfeasance, alert to the sabotage. But, he wondered, was one or all three part of the plot to see he went deaf and blind? That prospect had earlier urged him to keep them in the dark, until he learned more about a possible conspiracy that could topple the administration in Washington.

Raw nerves screamed he needed to get to his wife immediately and whisk her out of Amman, a short chopper ride across the border to the relative safety of Israel where he had Mossad contacts. If he was marked as a CIA operative, he knew it stood to grim reason the opposition had most likely smoked her out as something more than a diplomatic attaché. They might kidnap her as a bargaining chip to buy his allegiance. They were compromised, no question, and that came straight from the shadow who had offered him the brown envelope only hours ago.

Briefly, he recalled the twilight encounter in the desert. He had gone there to rendezvous with an informant inside a cell of rejectionist radical Jordanians aligned with Iraqi militants. A military Humvee sat in the distance, watching the encounter, while the shadow—a Westerner brandishing an M-16—materialized out of the lengthening dusk, putting it to him to go deaf, dumb and blind, or else.

“Forget what you have learned. Take this, await further instructions…or suffer consequences.”

No sale. He didn’t know whether it was a setup. The Company was infamous for playing head games, separating wheat from chaff, lamb from lion, but he was a patriot, loyal to only God, country and family.

With the ultimatum now come to collect, he knew there was no point, nor time to waste shredding documents, gather the latest intel on what he’d learned from informants the past two days on what his team had tagged the “great vanishing act.”

Time to fight or fly.

He marched for the double doors, briefly confounded and angry, wondering how four years of hunting down and flushing out the mystery of the weapons of mass destruction—so close but seeming like light-years away—was swirling in the bowl. The attempted bribery confirmed two critical items in his mind. First, the WMD was real, it was out there. And someone, supposedly on the side of the angels, did not want it found. The latter conclusion begged the obvious question.

Why, indeed?

He hit the door when the lights blinked out. For several moments he crouched at the barrier, heart thundering in his ears, as he silently urged the generator to kick in. Nothing. He freed the Beretta and twisted the door handle, wondering why the others were not scrambling down the hall, barreling into the study. He was out the door, weapon extended, listening to the silence, peering into the darkness in both directions down the hall when the auxiliary generator flashed on the emergency overhead lights. Heart pounding, aware he was exposed in the sudden glow, he flung himself against the wall, Beretta whipping, twelve and six. The corridor was empty, but he sensed a presence, his combat instincts torqued up, warning him the invader was close.

And the faint acrid stink bit his nose.

Ahead, he saw the pneumatic door to the Command and Control Room open. Sliding on, checking the gloomy murk to his rear, the coppery taint clawed deeper into his senses. That the door was open, however, the red light on the keypad blinking, confirmed the identity of the opposition.

Only the five men had access to the Storm Tracking Central.

Taking a deep breath, Dutton

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