was racing due west. The window for firing on the yacht was a brief one. Of the dozen or so shells fired at him, only two pinged off the long yacht’s snout, the rest ripping into the water on his starboard side.
But then the jump jet turned once again and was coming back at a much better firing angle.
There was no real mystery now. Fahim Shabazz knew that someone had obviously caught on to him.
Luckily, he had made provisions for just sort a thing.
He screamed for Abdul to come up from the engine room, then he started nervously playing with the silver rings on his fingers as he watched the jump jet approach again.
Abdul appeared and quickly appraised the situation. He disappeared below but reappeared a few moments later—with a third person.
She was an Asian woman—her name was Li. To a non-zealot Muslim, and to just about the rest of the world, she would have been considered astonishingly beautiful.
They had snatched her shortly after they’d swiped the key from the winners of the gagnant. She’d secreted herself near the bend in Palace Road, and at first they took her because she’d been a witness to the killings and they weren’t sure what to do with her. But then they decided to keep her for just such a thing as was happening now. She was their extra insurance.
Fahim Shabazz made her stand out in the open in full view of the oncoming fighter jet. He drew out his razor-sharp knife and put it up to her throat.
The jump jet streaked by—but did not fire this time. It turned and went by slower; the pilot was fixated on the beautiful woman, almost as if he knew her.
Then finally, the airplane slowly rose into the sky and eventually disappeared from sight.
26
Monte Carlo
IT WAS 8:00 A.M. when Murphy’s phone finally rang.
The three of them were still holed up in the support shack for Smoke-Lar. Twitch was presiding over the late support crew’s Power-Mac suite; it contained a Kestrel 4500 weather-tracking station and a GPS-slaved Earthworks program that allowed him to uncover the predetermined course of the two racing yachts. Batman, meanwhile, had been watching the door, on the lookout for any unexpected visitors.
Murphy had spent all this time on the phone. Outside, the preliminaries for the Grand Prix had begun, and between the sound of the Formula One cars and the noise made by the thousands of spectators awaiting the race, it didn’t seem like Monte Carlo would ever be quiet again.
But this did not deter him. He was constantly checking in with his network of operatives, especially the ones who were keeping an eye on Audette’s PSOs, who in turn were watching all the local transportation points where the terrorists or the other participants in the gagnant could leave the area. He spoke with other operatives who were watching for any suspicious activity around the Pakistani consulate.
Murphy was also in touch with his base of operations, which was a nondescript container ship anchored about fifteen miles to the west, off of Nice. While using cargo vessels as cover for special operations had been around since the Q-ships of World War Two, Murphy’s ship, built with funds he’d managed to weasel out of the U.S. government after 9/11, was not just for transport; it was a self-contained floating headquarters complete with advanced communications and eavesdropping equipment for his small army of spies and special ops experts. It was also part aircraft carrier: It was from here, still shrouded by the morning darkness and fog, that his unit’s jump jet had taken off.
Murphy had not been entirely successful getting all his people on the phone, though: at least one was not answering his calls. At one point, he blamed the growing commotion in town for screwing up his phone reception. “Monte Carlo is one big EID,” he said.
What Murphy was really doing, however, was waiting for someone to call him—namely the pilot of his jump jet. That was the one phone call that could change everything, the call that would tell them the key and the terrorists were sleeping with the fishes somewhere off the coast of Majorca. Only good things could come from that. The calamity that could be caused by the Z-box would be lessened tremendously. The box could then be tracked down in a much more rational manner. And the CIA could write a big fat check and reward those who’d pulled its collective ass from the fire.