'I think you're right.'

'There is that monastery in the mountain north of Kirkuk ...' For three seconds Karsaz spun his hand to conjure the name, but came up blank. 'You know the place I speak of?'

'I do.'

Karsaz neatly arranged the photos, handed them back to Hazo. 'I would suggest you go there. See if the monks might answer your questions.'

14.

LAS VEGAS.

Stokes punched his security code into the keypad and the mechanical jamb bolts disengaged. He cranked down on the handle, gave a push, and the door whispered open. The fowl stench of excrement drifted out at him. 'Good lord,' he gasped, holding back his gag reflex. He set the air filtration system to the max. Then taking the handkerchief from his blazer's breast pocket, he covered his mouth and tentatively proceeded into the vault.

At the room's centre, Roselli was sprawled face up on the carpet in a spread eagle, blue complexion, murky eyes opened wide and frozen to the blank ceiling. Whatever he'd had for dinner and breakfast, both liquid and solid, had found its way into his trousers. Post-mortem bowel release; Stokes had seen it many times in the killing fields.

'Oh, Frank. Why couldn't you just keep your cool, like the old days?' he said, crouching down and rummaging through the corpse's pockets until he found a key ring and Roselli's PDA. 'All right fellas,' he called back to the door. 'Get in here.'

A broad-shouldered man came in wearing a sour expression. Behind him a second man, shorter by at least five inches, came in pushing a heavy duty Rubbermaid tilt truck. Both men were wearing periwinkle baseball caps and coveralls embroidered with a crisp logo for a fict.i.tious company whose speciality was doc.u.ment shredding. The truck parked near the service entrance bore the same insignia, along with a slogan: 'YOUR SECURITY IS OUR SPECIALTY'.

Stokes stood and stepped aside. 'It's not pretty. I'll throw in extra for your trouble.'

'How do want to do this?' the taller one asked, all business.

'Let's go with heart attack at the wheel.' Stokes tossed the keys over.

'Like a telephone pole ... something like that?'

'Sure. Just nothing too dramatic,' Stokes reminded. On a previous a.s.signment to eliminate a pesky senator who'd been poking around into the project's financing, this same duo had roughed up the body enough to raise a coroner's suspicion. An investigation ensued, which luckily led only to dead ends.

'And no witnesses, you hear me?' Stokes warned. He slipped Roselli's PDA into his inside breast pocket.

'No witnesses,' the taller man replied.

'All right. Get him out of here.'

The shorter man wheeled the tilt truck closer.

The two men each claimed a spot on opposite sides of the corpse, hooked an armpit and a knee, hoisted the body up on a three-count, then dropped it into the tilt truck with a thud. The taller man folded down the stiff legs while his partner got back behind the handles.

Stokes stared down at the wide brown stain left behind on the rug. A call to housekeeping would raise too many questions. He settled on cleaning the mess himself.

As he made his way out from the vault, a small ring tone chirped inside his jacket. Stokes paused in confusion and pulled out Roselli's PDA. A confirmation flashed on the display: '2 MESSAGES DELIVERED.'

Liberated from the vault's thick walls, the PDA had finally caught some airwaves.

'Great,' Stokes huffed.

Navigating the BlackBerry's menus, he hunted for the draft copy of Roselli's first message. But he found nothing. Almost immediately, however, 'undeliverable' error messages started bouncing back from the intended recipients' e-mail accounts. Stokes was relieved to see that the addressees were the scientists who'd partaken in the 2003 cave excavation. The message began with a warning about Stokes's malicious intentions. Next came a rally call for each recipient to contact authorities with all information pertaining to his or her time spent in Iraq. Also included in the e-mail were hyperlinks to cla.s.sified material and doc.u.ments that detailed the project's true mission. What Roselli hadn't antic.i.p.ated was that Stokes's NSA contact had already deactivated and thoroughly emptied said e-mail accounts - stage one of the clean-sweep that would be complete only when each name in this e-mail wound up being the subject for an obituary. That task was well under way.

'Nice try, Frank. Always a step ahead of you.'

The PDA's grimy keyboard was making his fingers sticky; some tacky white powder that could only have come from the doughnuts that had led to Roselli's equally doughy belly. Disgusted, Stokes paused to wipe his hands with his handkerchief before hunting for the second stealth e-mail.

But sifting through the SENT and DELETED items, he could not find a second draft. If Roselli set the message to automatically delete upon transmission, there'd likely be no way of retrieving it or determining the recipient.

After two more minutes, however, Stokes did manage to determine the e-mail address to which the second message had been sent. The domain was registered to Our Savior in Christ Cathedral - Stokes's personal e-mail account. Rushing over to his computer, Stokes went into his e-mail client. Some spam about cheap health insurance and solar heating systems managed to sneak through, but nothing from Roselli.

What tricks did Roselli have up his sleeve? he wondered.

Cursing, Stokes tossed the PDA in his desk drawer.

From a utility closet adjacent to the elevator, he collected some cleaning supplies and made his way back into the vault. He began by thoroughly spritzing the air with odour neutralizer. Then off came his blazer and he got down on his knees to squirt the soiled mess with commercial-duty rug cleaner. He used a scrub brush to attack the stain, blotted up the resultant frothy goo with paper towels, and repeated the process. The heinous act reminded him of s.h.i.tter detail back in the Corps. Though nothing could match that raunchy mix of kerosene and flaming excrement - truly the stuff of nightmares.

Satisfied, Stokes rounded up the supplies and filled a trash bag with the waste.

15.

BOSTON.

'Your green tea with honey,' Agent Flaherty said, and set a paper cup in front of Brooke Thompson, waiter-style.

'Thanks. You're pretty good at table service.'

'Got me through college.' He set down a second cup for himself - black coffee - then sat in the chair on the opposite side of the cafe table. He took a second to peer out the floor-to-ceiling window at the wind whipping the snow drifts that carpeted Calderwood Courtyard. 'G.o.d, I hate the cold.'

'Then you might consider moving. Because last time I checked, the Boston summer lasts about two weeks.'

He chuckled. 'I grew up in Southie, youngest of seven. Leaving isn't an option. How about you ... leaving Florida to come here? Not exactly the picture of sanity.'

'I prefer beaches and sun, but I had to follow the work.'

Like many pallid Bostonian Irish, Brooke thought, the guy looked like he could use some time at the beach. Though it was that same UV avoidance that probably accounted for his unblemished complexion. If he'd graduated in '95, she a.s.sumed him to be thirty-six, maybe thirty-seven. But with thick black hair cropped in a short, corporate cut, he easily could pa.s.s for thirty. He was wearing a navy blazer - so trademark Boston - and she could tell by the way his arms and shoulders filled it that he was an athletic guy. Brooke was a stickler for a good nose and ears, and he had both; the right mix of pretty boy and man's man, naturally handsome, light on the manscaping. His magnetic eyes suffered an ident.i.ty-crisis between blue and green. Despite the bad one-liner he'd opened with back at the auditorium, Agent Thomas Flaherty had pa.s.sed her first-ten-seconds test with flying colours, she decided.

'Mind if I take notes?' he asked.

'Fine by me.'

He sipped some coffee, then took out a small notepad and a Bic pen. 'Let's talk about Iraq, starting with when you were there and why.'

'Hold on, Agent Flaherty ...'

'Tommy.'

'Right. Tommy. First you need to tell me why I should be talking to you.'

'Fair enough.' He did his best to keep it simple. 'There was an incident in the Iraqi mountains. Some of our guys were working under cover, patrolling the area. They got into a shooting match with some, how shall we say, hostile locals. An ID card with your name on it was found in the middle of it all.'

'ID card?' She considered this. 'Oh yeah. I did lose one of those. It was more like a security badge.'

'That's a good start. So tell me how you lost it. That way I can explain to my boss how you weren't a.s.sociated with the other side.'

His deadpan expression showed he wasn't joking. 'Look ... yes, I'd received an offer to a.s.sist in an excavation in the northern mountains. I accepted. I arrived there September 2003. The fourteenth, to be exact.'

This did jibe with the pa.s.sport activity provided to him. To keep her honest, he jotted down the date anyway.

'All expenses paid,' she added. 'It was a great resume builder, an incredible opportunity ... especially since Western archaeologists hadn't turned a shovel in that region for decades ... thanks to politics, of course. Since this was only months after the US invasion, everything was very hush-hush. And I wasn't told anything specific until I'd arrived in Baghdad.'

'Who made you this offer ... handled the arrangements?'

'A guy named Frank took care of everything.'

'Frank ...?'

She shrugged. 'Just Frank. He was a middleman.'

'He funded the project?'

She gave him a confused look. 'I was never told who funded the project. Not so unusual. Benefactors sometimes want to keep a low profile. But shouldn't you guys know this? I mean, why are you you asking asking me me?'

'Sorry?'

She held out her hands. 'I thought it was you guys.'

He returned a blank stare.

'You know, the military, some obscure part of Homeland Security, the CIA, or whatever it goes by nowadays. I mean, I'd been given a military escort ... US soldiers wearing desert fatigues with American flag arm patches, the works. You might want to ask your boss about that. Might save you some time.'

This temporarily stumped Flaherty. If his boss knew anything about it, this visit wouldn't be taking place. 'And what kind of work were you asked to perform?'

'What I do best, of course: decipher ancient languages. I was brought up north to the mountains ... to a tunnel, or a cave actually, that dated back a few thousand years. The walls were covered in ancient picture carvings and cuneiform. Wasn't easy, either. That language predated anything I'd ever seen. In some ways, more sophisticated than what came centuries after it. Really incredible stuff.' She checked to make sure n.o.body was listening in then said in a low tone, 'The kind of stuff that would challenge every established theory on the emergence of writing.'

'And what did it say?'

She bit her lower lip. 'Sorry. Can't share. I had to sign a confidentiality agreement.'

'I'll need to know.'

'Then you'll want to talk to Frank. Because if I can't publish in the American Journal of Archaeology American Journal of Archaeology or or National Geographic National Geographic, you'll have to wait your turn.'

'You have a number for this middleman, Frank?'

She shook her head. 'Everything was handled by e-mail. The couple times he did call, the number came up "restricted".'

'Of course it did.'

'Cloak and dagger. Just as you guys like it.'

'You can give me this e-mail address?'

'When I'm back to my computer, I suppose.'

He dug in his pocket and pulled out a business card, slid it over to her. 'If you could forward it to me, that'd be great. And try not to lose the card, please,' he taunted.

'Funny,' she said. She dropped the card into her clutch purse and snapped it shut like a clamsh.e.l.l. 'I remember when I lost that ID. Frank freaked out when I couldn't find it. There was so much equipment in the cave, debris too. Lord knows where it wound up. But he got me a new card within minutes. Super-tight security there. Guys with guns outside, the works. Lots of crazy stuff going on. I'd hear the fighter planes flying overhead ... bombings, gunfire off in the distance. Not the safest place to be at that time.'

'Any other scientists there?'

'A handful of others on rotation. Some coming, some going. Archaeologists, mostly. But we were kept apart, no consorting or information sharing. Really frustrating way to work. The others had higher clearance than me. I was only allowed in the entry pa.s.sage - the first leg of what was probably a maze of tunnels. There was a guard stationed where the entry tunnel forked, scanning IDs. Like a checkpoint.'

He needed to fish for a connection to the Arabs who were now holed up in the cave. 'Any chance it had something to do with Islamic militants?'

'You're kidding, right?'

Flaherty shook his head sharply.

'What I saw in that cave had been there over 4,500 years before Muhammad was even born. Terrifying, yes. Terrorism, no.'

A few tables away, Flaherty noticed a man, with a thin face and Dumbo ears, sipping coffee. The guy seemed preoccupied with their discussion, but quickly diverted his attention back to a museum map laid flat on the table. Flaherty lowered his voice. 'Anything else?'

'I was only there a few days, taking pictures, making rubbings of the walls. Once I cracked the alphabet, I was asked to give all the materials back. Then they put me back on a plane, no pictures, no records, no copies, nada. The most incredible thing I've ever seen and all I've got to show for it is up here.' She tapped her temple. 'But memories don't offer a high degree of provenance,' she said with great sarcasm. She watched him scrawling more chicken scratch, his fingers pinching the Bic way too tightly in a crooked grip. 'I'm not in any trouble, am I?'

Flaherty's eyes didn't move from the notepad. 'I'll need to report this all back to my boss, see what she has to say. There'll be some fact checking, of course.' He finally looked up. 'I'll keep you posted. But we'll probably need to meet again. So try not to skip town,' he said with a smile.

'Not even for some sunshine?'

'Not unless you bring me.' He said it too fast to catch himself, and he felt the blood rush into his cheeks. 'You know, because we may need you to answer more questions ...'

'Of course,' she said, grinning.

16.