All That Mattered, Ch. 01

Jonathan Stone told himself he wasn’t getting light-headed. He’d been in worse air than this, after all. Still, as he surreptitiously turned his watch so he could see, he reflected that it had been quite a while since he’d been around this much cigarette smoke. It stank more than he remembered, creeping into every nook and cranny of his surroundings.

He was definitely going to need a shower and a change of clothes before going over to Francine’s this evening. It’d been far too long since they’d seen each other, thanks to this trip, and he had taken time selecting special gifts to bring back — perfume, theater tickets, and a very large assortment of fine chocolates.

Jonathan shook his head. He sometimes still couldn’t quite believe that she’d actually given him a second chance, and he was determined to prove to her that she hadn’t made a mistake. This time, he was going to do it right.

A sharp rap on his left arm drew him out of his thoughts. “What your hurry?”

He dropped his arm without reading the watch, but he guessed it couldn’t be any earlier than 5:30. He was due at his fiancée’s apartment in less than an hour.

Next to him, his assailant — whom he belatedly remembered as bearing the name Hamza — grinned, revealing a wide gap in his teeth. “End of day, yes? Got woman?”

Never give away more information than you have to. What you haven’t shared, can’t be used against you or anyone else in your life. Francine had told him that once, and he remembered it now. His response was a simple shrug.

Of course, Francine could easily hold her own against small-time operators like the cell in this room, but then again, if these people knew he was engaged to a Federal agent and not a film production assistant, his life would be instantly forfeit. As would the life of at least one other person, someone who was still relying on him to stay invisible. He’d managed to convince the French authorities of her importance, and he had paperwork in his carry-on — concealed between the pages of a feasibility analysis — but things were still far from final. Better to play this card as close to the chest as he could.

He should talk to Francine first anyway. Rumors had a way of spreading like wildfire if they had even the slightest chance to get started.

Over in one dark corner, a knot of men were gathered around one of the biggest computers Jonathan had ever seen. They’d all been staring at its screen while one person manipulated the keyboard, and now a quiet cheer went up. It created enough of a distraction that he was able to successfully check his watch this time. 5:45.

Come on, he thought. It can’t take you that much longer.

Another person, who’d started out by introducing himself as Abu Ghadan, appeared at his elbow. With a word, Hamza was dismissed, and Jonathan now faced the apparent leader of this cell. Unlike Hamza, Abu Ghadan’s English was fluent. It was even cultured, suggesting he had received an education, and he was smoking an elegant Cuban cigarillo instead of the others’ cigarettes. But his motives weren’t any more honorable or aboveboard than the guard’s had been.

“You’ll be released in due time,” he told Jonathan in his vaguely transatlantic accent. “What’s your hurry?”

He shrugged again, hoping the gesture would conceal the roiling anger and fear he was feeling. “Hamza was right. I’m meeting someone for dinner this evening. She’ll be upset if I’m late.”

“We definitely can’t have that,” said Abu Ghadan. “When are you due to arrive and where?”

Jonathan narrowed his eyes.

In response, the other man laughed, but it wasn’t clear whether the laughter was based in delight or malice. “Keep your secrets, then, Stone. For as long as you can, anyway. And all the good it will do you.”

He wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.

“If the information you gave us was valid, we’ll know in the next five minutes,” continued the militant leader.

“I didn’t give you any information,” snapped Jonathan before he thought better of it. “You took it from me.”

He had thought he’d felt eyes on him as he’d walked through the concourse, but when nothing happened, he’d chalked it up to paranoia. Then they’d intercepted him at baggage claim, moving quickly and quietly with a skill that ensured discretion. Once they’d gotten to this dark, airless room, they’d searched him thoroughly. Including his wallet, where they’d found the slip of paper.

Now, Abu Ghadan waved a hand. “A purely semantic difference.”

“It’s a damned important one!” he shot back. “I never should’ve let —”

“Enough,” the leader replied. While his tone was still silky-smooth, the smile had left his face and there was no doubting the steel underneath it. “But rest assured, if that’s what your conscience requires. Your participation was unwitting. If you hadn’t been selected as the courier, someone else would have. It makes no difference who actually brought this last code in. Just that we received it, and tested it, and that it is shown to be valid.”

“If that’s the case, then, why don’t you let me leave?”

The other man laughed again, and this time there was no doubt about the underlying harshness. “You know better than that, Stone. Or at least, you should, since you’ve been in this situation before.”

That was quite true, but this time, at least, he’d thought he was being careful. As he’d exited the American embassy in Paris, a staffer had slipped this piece of paper into his cuff. He’d started to object, but she’d shaken her head and vanished as quickly as she’d appeared.

Back at his hotel room, the concierge had given him a message: Don’t worry. You’ll be met. That’s all we need. There hadn’t been time to get back to the embassy to protest, but a quick discussion with one of the resident “cultural attachés” had provided assurances that everything would be all right.

Somehow, though, Jonathan doubted these men were the intended recipients of whatever had been written on that piece of paper. He’d looked at it himself, but it had been nothing more than a long string of numbers and letters: some sort of code he couldn’t decipher, and that was probably meant for a computer anyway. It didn’t appear to fit any sort of mnemonic purpose.

He inwardly damned himself again for tucking the slip of paper into his wallet instead of carrying it in a less obvious place. When the cell had searched him, he’d pretended nothing about the slip of paper mattered, trying to pass it off as a receipt. Abu Ghadan had responded with a shake of the head and a tsking noise. The darker-skinned man wasn’t wrong, Jonathan reflected. A wallet was the first place anyone would look. Could you have been any more clueless, Stone? he thought to himself.

Unfortunately, it was now too late to worry about that.

From the corner, underneath a curtain of blue smoke that shone brightly under a hanging lamp, someone shouted. Then everyone seemed to be talking at once, and not quietly, either.

“Come, then,” said Abu Ghadan. His hand on Jonathan’s elbow was gentle, but there was no doubt that this was an order, not a request. Jonathan felt his heart sink. Just how much was he going to have to endure looking straight into the face of his failure? He shook his head, trying to memorize details of the diagrams and schematics that had appeared on the computer screen. Even a tiny scrap of information could be useful, once he brought this back to the proper authorities.

That was something he definitely intended to do. He was tired of being used by every intelligence-gathering operation he seemed to come across, and cleaning up this mess just might let him walk away for good.

Beside him, the cell leader had begun to nod. “Excellent. It seems, Mr. Stone, that your information was worth the price it cost us. Not just in money, but also in blood.”

So it had cost them, then, but at the moment, he couldn’t have cared less. That was Abu Ghadan’s worry, not his.

He sneaked another look at his watch. Incredibly, only five additional minutes had passed. He might make it home, through the shower, and over to Francine’s on time after all.

“You’ll let me go now,” he said, hoping his voice sounded firmer than he felt. “You don’t need anything else from me.”

“That’s right,” replied the other man, but then he signaled to someone behind Jonathan. “We have no need or use for you anymore.”

At the sound of metal-on-metal, he turned to see Hamza and one of the other guards standing there, bearing long, sharp, wicked-looking knives. That was when he understood: there was no time left. And nowhere he could run.

---

Lee Stetson ran like hell.

The time for a subtle or elegant exit had long since passed, although he had accomplished what he’d set out to do. He could hear the explosions behind him as the charges he’d planted went off, destroying this Stasi cell’s stockpile of smallpox virus without accidentally releasing any into the air. All he had to do now was get himself out, and he’d be done with this task, done with the day, and done with this mission.

It had seemed almost too easy. His German had a bit of a French accent, yes, but he was still fluent enough to bluff his way in. His wife Amanda’s research had proved invaluable: she’d fed him enough jargon and detail to make him sound believable as a biomedical researcher. He’d had to repeatedly practice some of the longer, more technical words, but it had paid off handsomely. Besides, he’d always had a good ear for languages.

Even with that obfuscation, it had still taken him several weeks to earn his way into the inner circle of the cell and determine where, exactly, the vials of smallpox were stored. He’d actually begun work on this case before they’d closed the last one — the one that had included the murders of his mother-in-law and stepson. But he hadn’t hadn’t started the infiltration part until afterward.

Lee ducked as low as he could manage when he heard the crackle of bullets overhead.

Unfortunately, finding out where the vials were didn’t get him access; it was strictly controlled. After several more conventional attempts to get it failed, the folks down in Fabrication had come up with a scanner that let him take a digital “impression” of the leader’s key card. From there, they’d created a duplicate that had worked beautifully.

At the time, Lee had been suitably impressed at the ways technology and computers were advancing. Now, though, he was just trying to get out alive.

He was careful to keep his trajectory erratic; straight lines were always easier to intercept. It helped the grounds outside the lab building hadn’t been consistently kept up; there were patches of shrubbery here and there that let him pause for a few seconds and redirect.

There had been alarms in the storage room, of course. That was just plain common sense. What he hadn’t known was that there had also been a hidden camera — and that someone had been actively monitoring it. The alarms had sounded as soon as he started placing charges, forcing him to finish up a little haphazardly. No matter; the explosions had done their job anyway, albeit in a rather more obvious way than he’d originally planned.

Lee’s long legs pounded through another patch of roughly-kept grass, and he dodged right the moment he saw a break in the shrubbery. Sprinting through it, he came out into an area that the Stasi cell — or whomever ran the nondescript office building they’d been in — hadn’t bothered to keep up at all. The grass was almost waist-high in places, even for him, and if the ground had ever been leveled out it had been a long time ago. Now, he was occasionally stumbling over unexpected dips and bumps.

A hundred and thirty more yards, though, and he’d been able to get into a true wooded area. That would be enough for him to evade his pursuers.

Good, he thought, pushing himself to run harder and faster. The time they spent waiting for backup would be time he could use to get further away. He yanked out his portable. “Base, Scarecrow. I should be at Double Gate Road in —” he checked his watch. “Thirty seconds. Be there.”

Giving up all pretense of running avoidance patterns, he made straight for his goal, listening behind him for the sounds of shouts or gunshots. There weren’t any. Had he lost them already? Lee turned briefly to look, and was startled to see that the two men who’d been after him had stopped at the edge of the unkempt area, shouting and gesturing rather than advancing.

As he turned back, digesting this curious fact, he stumbled over another hidden hillock. It was a matter of long habit to shift his balance and keep going. Then, when his right foot came down on the far side of the mound, the world spun completely out of control.

Without warning, he found himself thrown up into the air, flailing and tumbling for any purchase at all. His ears began ringing and everything seemed to be closing in around him. He fought the sensation, desperately trying to keep going toward the woods, but nothing seemed to be working anymore. Damn it, he thought. I was so close!

He blacked out before he felt any pain.