Killer Instinct (Instinct #2)(57)

Instead, I sat down and simply exhaled. Shoes or no shoes, I realized that ultimately catching the Mudir would have nothing to do with my feet. It was all between the ears. I’d have to outthink him.

“He just hit the lobby,” said Julian. “Elvis has left the building.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You still there?” Julian finally asked.

“Yeah. Still here.”

“You okay?”

“I will be.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said. “Okay, say it with me now.”

I knew what was coming. Of his many eclectic pursuits and interests, World War II held a special place in Julian’s heart. Most people fixated on the musings of Winston Churchill. Julian, however, was more partial to quoting Charles de Gaulle. Go figure.

“C’mon, don’t leave me hanging,” he said before switching to his horrible French accent. “France has lost a battle …”

It was the accent that got me every time. “But France has not lost the war,” I said.

Julian was reminding me that we’d been here before. The setback. The bump in the road. But this time felt different. The word war had always been a metaphor. Now it was literal.

“How much time do you figure?” asked Julian.

“Forty-eight hours,” I answered.

That’s how long we had to stop the Mudir before his next attack.





CHAPTER 80


TWO LARGE blackboards had been wheeled into the windowless conference room at the JTTF field unit, along with a mini fridge filled with sodas and waters. Four pizzas had been ordered, delivered, and eaten.

“Go home and get some sleep,” Evan Pritchard told his assistant, Gwen, at almost three in the morning. She declined by quoting Warren Zevon.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” she said. Then she announced to the room that she was making another pot of coffee. “Raise your hand if you want some.”

Everyone’s hand shot up.

We were redefining the meaning of joint in the Joint Terrorism Task Force. In fact, the non-agents outnumbered the agents. Elizabeth and her boss, Pritchard, were the only ones with proper JTTF field unit IDs. Landon Foxx, my father, and I were their SIGs, special invited guests. SIGs who just happened to be current and former CIA. Last but not least, on the two-way encrypted speakerphone, was Julian.

In the light of day, this ad hoc gathering of the minds would’ve never happened. Egos aside, there’d be too much bureaucratic red tape to slice and dice through. But under the cover of night, with the red tape asleep or at least looking the other way, here we were.

Waiting.

“I like the sound that chalk makes,” Pritchard had told us, explaining his preference for blackboards in strategy sessions. “That’s all we use here. It makes everything you write more emphatic.”

Emphatically written across the two blackboards was everything we knew so far. And everything included a few things only some of us in the room should’ve been allowed to know. But there was simply no time for parsing security clearances. The clock was ticking. The Mudir had literally said as much.

My old friend and operative Ahmed Al-Hamdah had infiltrated one of the Mudir’s cells. He gave his life trying to prevent the Times Square bombings. In doing so, he spooked the Mudir to the point of thinking there could be other moles in his cells. In his effort to find them, the Mudir somehow found a path that led directly to me. He literally knocked on my front door.

Only days before that, Professor Jahan Darvish’s corpse had been discovered in his Manhattan hotel room. His toxicology report, filed by a city coroner, was initially viewed under the pretense of an accidental death. A second—and secret—report, issued by the CIA, had no such pretense but still couldn’t prove foul play. While the combination of drugs in Darvish’s system may have precipitated his cardiac arrest, two of the three had been prescribed for him.

Now, in reexamining the report, what appeared to be an inadvertent overdose was most likely anything but. As for the mini bottle of Jim Beam in his actual butt, well, that was just clever to the point of genius. Classic misdirection of the mind. Professor Darvish just had to be the only person in the room given something like that, right?

Wrong. Sadira Yavari either killed him herself or paved the way for someone else. Because she’d used Halo to conceal her identity, my initial thought was that she was CIA. Foxx, as the Agency’s New York section chief, would almost certainly know if she was an operative. But he swore up and down that she wasn’t. And while the first rule of being with the Agency is Trust no one, I had no reason not to believe him. Especially when he revealed that Darvish had been a CIA informant.

There you have it. A terrorist attack and a murder in a hotel room. Two seemingly unrelated events that would’ve stayed unrelated were it not for a certain Russian art dealer, Viktor Alexandrov. Professor Darvish had been receiving additional money beyond what the Iranian government was paying him, and Alexandrov had been the cryptocurrency point man. Turned out, he also had been a point man for the Mudir on some type of shipment that had yet to clear customs.

Which, over the span of two rectangular blackboards, brought everything full circle. The Mudir and Darvish were somehow connected, courtesy of Alexandrov. Unfortunately, out of those three, two of them were dead.

So was a young man named Gorgin, as well as the guy with a pointed beard who killed him when it became clear that Gorgin was going to help Elizabeth. Gorgin, whoever he was, saved Elizabeth’s life.