True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(48)
“It feels great to strike back instead of running,” Ian said. “Now they can start being afraid.”
“Do we know who we’re scaring?” Margo said.
“Wilton Cross. He’s the man who recruited me and the three other writers,” Ian said. “He’s the one we have to take down.”
“How are we going to do that?” Ronnie asked.
“With a rocket, I hope,” Margo said.
“We can’t beat them with our weapons,” Ian said. “Our only option is to turn their strength into their weakness and—”
Margo interrupted him. “Use their own force against them. Yeah, yeah, I know all that shit. It’s straight out of your Straker books.”
“It’s also the ancient philosophy behind judo and other martial arts,” Ian said.
“I know that, too.” She put her hands on her hips and faced Ian. “But what does that blah blah blah actually mean for us? How are we going to take down Blackthorn?”
“You mean the jackbooted army of the New World Order,” Ronnie said.
“I mean the professional assassins who want to kill us and will find us anywhere we try to hide.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve worked out the fine points,” Ian said. “But the first step is to get out of Las Vegas.”
Bethesda, Maryland. July 21. 7:49 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Wilton Cross’ kitchen smelled like a bakery. Just breathing the air was fattening. The grandchildren were coming over that afternoon so his wife, Sarah, was baking a cake for them. She’d started on it immediately after preparing fried eggs, crispy bacon, buttermilk biscuits, a bowl of strawberries, and fresh-ground coffee for her husband, Wilton, who was eating his breakfast at the kitchen table while reading the Washington Post and watching Fox News.
He wore a red cardigan, one of the dozens in various colors and patterns that Sarah had bought for him. It was the kind of sweater that Hugh Beaumont, Fred MacMurray, and Robert Young used to wear while playing sitcom dads. Nobody wore them anymore, not even on TV, but his wife insisted that he change into one as soon as he walked through the front door when he got home from the office. It fit with her manufactured and comforting image of him as an average family man, an insurance salesman perhaps, coming home from work. She didn’t want to think about what he actually did. All she knew was that he worked for the government and that he couldn’t talk about his job. But she wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t have married her if she were.
They’d met when they were both students in their twenties at Yale, where she majored in classical civilization, concentrating on Greek literature, and he studied political science with an emphasis on international relations. His studies had served him well in his current profession but her literary interests these days were limited to the prodigious output of Nora Roberts and Janet Evanovich.
Sarah was gray-haired now and her skin was lined but she’d managed to keep her slim figure as she’d aged. If Cross squinted, and imagined away the apron that she always wore, he could see the same woman he’d married decades ago. He did a lot of imagining when they were in bed and he was sure that she did, too. He’d aged and fattened over time and knew that he’d grown more emotionally distant. That’s because now there was far more of his life that he couldn’t share with her than there was that he could. There was nothing about her that he didn’t know. What she didn’t tell him he knew from the surveillance devices that watched her in the house and car and recorded her conversations on the phone.
Wilton had spent the night at home and was planning to spend the day there as well, because he was no longer in “crisis mode” at the office. Ludlow was dead and the operation was moving into the political phase, which was scripted and would unfold without him having to do anything.
The bodies of Ayoub Darwish and Habib Ebrahimi, the men framed for downing the TransAmerican flight, had already arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. Their computers and cell phones were being analyzed by Blackthorn, which was redundant, since they were the ones who’d loaded them with the fraudulent e-mails, files, and photos that would prove that the terrorist group Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiyya was behind the crash and was planning more attacks. The CIA’s ineptitude and grave operational shortcomings, and the threat they presented to the nation’s security, would soon be abundantly clear to the Senate Intelligence Committee and to the president . . . if they weren’t already.
Although the cause of the plane crash, and the key persons responsible for it, had been identified, none of that information had been released publicly yet. It was still top secret until all of the facts were known by investigators and it was decided how the credit for the discoveries would be divvied up among the players for maximum political gain. So far, only the information about the hacking device implanted in the Gordon-Ganza 877 aircraft had gone public. That was the news that dominated the front page of the Washington Post this morning. On TV, Cross watched as Fox’s Shepard Smith reported the details while showing video of grounded jets sitting on the tarmac at major airports.
SMITH: All Gordon-Ganza 877s worldwide have been grounded, effective immediately, until each plane can be searched for a device that allows terrorists to remotely access the autopilot system. Any 877s still flying in US airspace are being escorted to the nearest landing strips by fighter jets. Airports around the world are packed with stranded travelers. A travel nightmare like this has not been seen since 9/11.