Dead or Alive - By Tom Clancy Page 0,254

luck probably played a big part in both those outcomes.

As Kaseke’s mine was tipping forward, the Alvey family mounted the front steps along with dozens of other late arrivals and started upward. Hank walked closest to the hedges bordering the steps, with Josh and Amanda to his left, then Katie and Jeremy, who was holding his mom’s hand.

Witnesses would later describe the explosion as a whoosh followed by the hailstorm from hell. Katie neither saw nor heard these things but had for some reason turned her head to look at Hank when the Claymore went off. Of the seven hundred bearings inside the mine, four hundred or so struck the dirt, cratering the bed and taking a yard-wide chunk out of the concrete. The remainder of the bearings either skittered along the concrete, punching through feet and calves, shattering bones and ripping away whole chunks of flesh, or bounced off the concrete and tore across the steps at various angles and trajectories. Those unlucky enough to be struck by these were either killed instantly or suffered horrific limb injuries. Hank Alvey, his body protecting his oldest boy and his daughter, caught a ball bearing beneath the left jaw, effectively cleaving his head into three portions. Katie saw this but had no time to react, no time to grab any of the children or to shield Jeremy with her body. As it turned out, none of it had been necessary.

Katie stood blinking, her ears ringing and her brain failing to immediately register the carnage around her. On either side of her, Josh, Jeremy, and Amanda were similarly stunned, but that passed quickly, and then the tears started to flow. The steps were awash in blood and littered with arms and legs and unidentifiable chunks of ... who? She recognized no one. Dozens of people lay strewn across the concrete. Some weren’t moving, while others writhed in pain or tried to crawl away or toward loved ones, their mouths moving but no sound coming out.

Then Katie’s ears cleared and she heard the screaming. And sirens.

86

AFTER MAKING SURE all the drapes were closed, they turned on lights around the house, then Jack called Pasternak and had him pull the van into the garage. The doctor walked through the kitchen door and stopped short. “Is that him?”

Jack said, “No, this is Tariq, the Emir’s bodyguard.”

In fact, it had taken ten minutes of talking to simply get Tariq to admit his own name. Beyond that, he’d said nothing. Chavez and Domingo were tossing the rest of the house, but so far it had all the individuality of a builder’s model home. There were no personal touches.

“It appears we just missed the man himself,” Jack said. “Go have a seat in the living room, Doc. We’ll call you.” He joined Clark at the table across from Tariq. They’d bound his hands and ankles with duct tape, then taped his feet to the kitchen-table leg.

“What happened to your hands?” Clark asked.

Tariq took them off the table and put them in his lap. “A fire.”

“I assumed that. How specifically?”

“You invade my home, drag me from my bed. You are not the police. Who are you; what do you want?”

“You know why we’re here,” Jack said. “When did he leave?”

“Who? I live here alone.”

“Shasif Hadi tells us a different story,” Clark said.

At the mention of Hadi’s name, Tariq’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly, then went back to normal.

“Aren’t you interested in how we found Hadi?” Jack asked. “We picked him up in Rio de Janeiro. After the attack on the Paulinia refinery, he was ordered by the Emir to break contact with Ibrahim, Fa’ad, and Ahmed. The Emir had told him the others had betrayed him.”

“That’s not—” Tariq stopped in mid-sentence.

Clark said, “Not true? You’re right. The truth is we broke your crypto. All those onetime pads embedded in the website banners ... We broke it, then uploaded a message to Hadi’s storage site of the day, and sent him on the run—right into our laps.” Clark looked at Jack. “It took, what, ten minutes for him to break?”

“Not even. Here’s another piece of news, Tariq: The cargo ship Losan—we put a stop to that, too. The Salim kids are dead, and the Newport News Fire Department is offloading the propane tanks as we speak.”

This time, Tariq couldn’t help himself. “You’re lying!”

“About what part?” Clark asked. “Hadi or Losan?”

“Both.”

“So you admit who you are and that you know the Emir.”

Tariq clasped his hands on the table before him and

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