“Papa, are you sure she can’t hear us?” asked Katya, whispering.
“Positive, angel. What is it?”
“Did you ask her yet?”
“Ask her?”
“Yes. You know,” said Katya. “If she wants to be my mommy?”
“How do you know about that?”
“You told Martin that it was a special trip,” Katya continued, and he could imagine her holding the phone with both hands close to her face. “You said that you had something important to ask.”
“Did I?”
“I saw the ring,” she continued breathlessly. “You were keeping it in the bathroom next to the floss. I’m not stupid, you know?”
“On the contrary,” said Mac. “Right now, we have to keep this our secret. When I ask, you’ll be the first to find out.”
“She promised to bring me back a doll,” said Katya. “Mommies only bring back those for their daughters.”
“How do you know that?” asked Mac.
“Because that’s what my mommy always brought me when she’d been away.”
Mac smiled, if only to hold back his emotions. “Katya, I have to go now.”
“Are you off for a lovely dinner?”
“Yes,” said Mac, in awe as usual over her vivid and far-too-mature imagination. “And we will raise a toast to you.”
“Don’t worry,” said Katya. “I know she’ll say yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Ava doesn’t have another daughter,” said Katya. “She needs me.”
Chapter 12
Langley, Virginia
“Yes, Don, I do know Mac Dekker.”
Eliza Porter Elkins opened a fresh bottle of Maker’s Mark and poured it into the decanter. She was drinking too much these days, but she needed someone to talk to, and she was her own best friend. No one else was as witty, perceptive, or honest. She refilled her glass, then stood at the window and peered out at the rolling countryside. The leaves were turning. Another month and the trees would be bare.
Eliza buzzed her assistant. “Hold all calls.”
She flicked a switch on her table lamp, activating sound baffles that threw off white noise, making it impossible for any unfriendly parties to listen in. She took a cell phone from the bottom drawer of her desk. It was a stealth special, modified for just this kind of thing. Untraceable. No number. No GPS. The equivalent of digital scrambled eggs.
She hit speed dial and was connected to a nameless office in the bowels of the NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center, down the road in McLean. She identified herself, then asked to speak with their European substation, located (conveniently) in Paris, France.
“One moment, please, while we connect you.”
“Thank you,” said Eliza, before enjoying a long, slow sip of bourbon.
In her mind’s eye, she wasn’t gazing out upon a bleak, rainy autumn landscape. She was staring up at the noonday sun near Baghdad,thinking she’d never seen a light so harsh and unforgiving. March 2006. She was forty, recently retired from the US Navy, a lieutenant commander with seventeen years in as a helicopter pilot. Her bird was a Sikorsky Sea King, and later the MH-60 Sierra, combat search and rescue. It was her first trip overseas out of uniform. She was eager to do a good job. No, not just a good job; an exemplary job.
Eliza had come to the Middle East previously as a member of the Iraq Survey Group, or ISG. The ISG’s mandate was to search Iraq top to bottom for proof that Saddam Hussein was indeed manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. For years now, the country had heard rumors of chemical weapons and yellowcake and secret laboratories where the Iraqi strongman was expending millions of dollars to build nuclear weapons that might be used against the West. Not just rumors. There was hard intelligence. Irrefutable fact. A casus belli.
