Fires of War (3 page)

“Like many of the people who work for him at the CIA,” continued the president, “Tom Parnelles does not trust the North Koreans to tell him whether the sun is shining on a cloudless day.”

“Do you?”

“Of course not.” McCarthy laughed. “That’s why your people are there.”

Corrine wasn’t particularly comfortable calling the First Team “her people,” but she let the remark pass.

“Anything else, Jon?”

“No. Thank you, dear. I believe I should release you back to your regular chores.”

“I’ll have that briefing paper on the requests from the Senate ready for you first thing in the morning, so you can read it on your way up to Pennsylvania.”

“Very good.” McCarthy was heading off on a nine-day, twelve-state swing across the country in the morning. “By the way, Miss Alston, I spoke to your daddy last evening. He asked me to send his regards.”

“Oh?”

“He was concerned that you are not getting enough time off. He saw a picture of you on the television the other day and said you looked rather ragged.”

“I hope you took full blame for that.”

“I did, I did. And I gave orders to the press secretary to keep you off camera from now on.”

“I’m in favor of that.”

“Call him a little more, would you, dear?” said McCarthy as she got up to leave.

“I call him once a week.”

“That’s not very much to a father. Trust me.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

~ * ~

3

ROME

Ferguson and Rankin caught a commercial flight from Sicily to Rome’s Da Vinci airport, where they were supposed to be met by a specially chartered Gulf Stream and flown to Korea. But the plane had been delayed leaving the States and wouldn’t arrive for several hours; it would need at least one on the ground to refuel.

Rather than hanging out in the terminal, Ferguson decided they should go into the city. He could check the latest intelligence at the embassy, then maybe find a decent dinner and an espresso. Ferguson had always liked Rome; when he was a kid, his father had come over every few weeks from Egypt and Ferguson had occasionally tagged along.

He realized now that his father had probably been running a spy here or sending back material he’d gathered in Cairo—most likely both—but at the time it seemed like a vacation.

“Rome’s cool when you’re a kid,” he told Rankin in the cab. “I used to play hide-and-seek in the Forum ruins and chase cats in the Coliseum.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing the Coliseum,” said Rankin. “And St. Peter’s.”

“St. Peter’s? The cathedral?”

“Why not?”

The taxi driver looked over his shoulder and told them that the cathedral would be closed for tours in an hour and, if he wanted to see it, he’d better go there first.

“All right, you go over to the church. I’ll meet you there when I’m done,” Ferguson told Rankin.

Rankin could never tell with Ferguson whether he had another agenda or not—usually he had three or four going at a time and would share only one and a half—but finally he decided Ferguson was just trying to be nice.

Uncharacteristically nice, as far as Rankin was concerned, but what the hell.

“Thanks,” he told Ferguson. “I appreciate it.”

“Any time, Skippy.”

Rankin felt his face burn red but kept his mouth shut.

~ * ~

erguson’s first order of business in the embassy’s secure communications center was to check in with the mission coordinator back home in what was affectionately known as “The Cube.” Nothing more than a high-tech communications center—albeit one located in a bugproof concrete bunker—The Cube was located beneath a nondescript building in a ho-hum industrial park in Virginia. Mission coordinators manned the Cube around the clock, providing Ferguson and other team members with whatever they needed. A small group of researchers and analysts were also housed at the facility, assigned to support current operations.

“Hey, Ferg,” said Jack Corrigan, the mission coordinator on duty. “Sorry about the plane.”

“Not a problem, Jack. Gave Rankin a chance to connect with his inner tourist.”

“Van wants you to check in with him.”

“He’s my next call.”

“How was Thera?”

“Crazy legs? She’s just fantastic.”

“Huh?”

“Long story, Jack. She’s fine. Looking forward to it. Promised to send postcards.”

“IAEA just told their staff.”

“Good for them. Can you get me Van?”

“On it.”

A few minutes later, Colonel Charles Van Buren’s voice snapped onto the line.

“Hey, Ferg,” said the colonel, speaking from Osan military base in South Korea. “Where are you?”

“On my way. What’s going on? You sound tired.”

“Playing basketball. Gettin’ my ass whooped.”

“We set?”

“Everything’s planned out. We have an unexpected bonus from the navy: amphibious warship we can use as an emergency base in the Yellow Sea.”

“Oh that’s discreet. No one will look for us there.”

“It’ll be two hundred and fifty miles offshore.”

“Long way to swim.”

“Only for an emergency, Ferg. Don’t worry.”

“All right. We’ll be out there soon. Keep your elbows to yourself.”

His phone calls done, Ferguson went over to one of the computers that could be used to access the Internet without being traced. He sat down at the machine, put his hands together, and then spread his fingers backward, cracking his knuckles on both hands the way his piano teacher had when he was six or seven. He smiled wryly, remembering the smells of stale cigarettes and staler sherry that had drifted from Mr. Cog when they sat down to practice. Ferg had had four years of lessons, on and off, and besides a mean “Chopsticks” and half a Beethoven sonata, the knuckle cracking was all he’d retained.

Ferguson called up Microsoft Internet Explorer and used it to find the main page of a small telephone company in Maine that offered highspeed Internet connections and e-mail boxes back in the States. From there he entered an account name and password and checked his personal e-mail. There was only one piece of correspondence in the file, and in fact he’d read it twice already, but it was what he had come to look at. The file popped open in the mail reader, narrow black letters on a ghost-white screen.

ferg
: Well, you’ve always said play it straight, so here goes . . .

Ferguson scrolled through the numbers that followed, which had been taken from a medical test a week ago. The most important numbers measured the amount of radiation in his body following his ingestion of a rock-sized piece of iodine. They indicated that his thyroid cancer was spreading to areas well beyond the neck area, including his pancreas and liver.

This was the third time he’d looked at the e-mail, and he knew the numbers by heart now. It was the message in layman’s terms from the doctor that he wanted to read ... or not.

As you can see, there are cells there that we don’t want. A lot of them. We’ve discussed the feasibility of further radiation treatments; obviously, that’s your decision. As I said, I can recommend some clinicians who are pursuing other avenues of inquiry. Let me know. . .

—Dr. Zeist

The conversation about radiation therapy—the only effective, tested treatment after removal of the thyroid—had taken place before the test. The doctor had repeated what Ferguson himself had already read in the medical papers regarding his thyroid cancer: In essence, further radiation treatments wouldn’t do any good.

“Other avenues of inquiry” were trial programs for untested therapies, aka wild shots in the dark, uncomfortable shots in the dark, most of them.

Ferguson folded his arms. His cancer had always seemed theoretical, even when they’d taken out his thyroid. His body was screwed up and out of whack, to be sure: He had to take synthetic thyroid hormones twice a day, or he turned into Mr. Hyde within twenty-four hours, the sharp corners of the world closing in around him and his head exploding. But he didn’t feel like he was going to
die
, to really die.

Thyroid cancer was supposed to be the easiest cancer to beat, like the flu, or measles. The little glowing dots on the doctors’ screens and the long reports of scan results didn’t match up with who he was. He wasn’t going to die, not from cancer for cryin’ out loud.

A part of him had always suspected that he was a prisoner of fate, that in the end he’d have no more power over his future than a housefly trapped in a spider’s web. But not
this.

“Ah, screw this horseshit,” Ferguson said out loud.

He hit the button to delete the e-mail.

~ * ~

ankin took another step to the side, admiring Michelangelo’s
Pietà.
The statue loomed over the space of the side altar, the folds in the marble so supple they seemed to be floating on the wind. Working the stone required not only artistry but physical strength and finesse, hitting it with enough force to shape the marble yet not quite enough to turn it into dust.

Rankin was so absorbed in the statue that he didn’t hear Ferguson sneaking up behind him.

“I didn’t know you were such an art lover.”

Rankin just barely kept himself from jumping.

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know, Ferg.” He turned to leave.

“Hey, take your time. Plane’s not even at the airport yet.”

“I’m done,” said Rankin, walking away. “Let’s get something to eat.”

Ferguson looked up at the face of Mary, her agony crowded into elongated, blank eyes. Her lips were parted, as if she were about to say something, and yet the marble rendered her forever mute.

Once, on a visit with his dad when he was seven or eight, Ferguson thought he heard the statue whisper something to him about saying his prayers. Convinced, he did so for the next two weeks without fail, easily his longest streak, not counting the lead-up to Christmas.

That was back in the days when religion was easier, when a person was a good Catholic simply if he or she went to mass. Now going to mass made him feel just the opposite.

Ferguson stared at the statue. He could hear some of the tourists whispering nearby; undoubtedly that was what he had heard when he was a kid, but he winked at her anyway, preferring to keep the fantasy alive.

~ * ~

4

SOUTH CHUNGCHONG PROVINCE, SOUTH KOREA

Roughly forty-eight hours after Bob Ferguson took her into his arms in Sicily, Thera Majed stepped out of a white SUV at the Blessed Peak South Korean Nuclear Waste Disposal and Holding Station thirty miles northwest of Daejeon. A gust of wind caught her by surprise and sent a cold shiver through her body. It was unusually cold for early November, but as Thera zipped her heavy parka closed, she thought of how much colder it would be when she reached North Korea.

Cold and alone, though surrounded by people.