LITMIR.BIZ

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maybe impossible, venture. This was not an easy region to rule.

      Brandywine had several contracts on the go in-country and maintained its own private airline, called Chardonair, to support its operations here and elsewhere. Brandywine’s employees were among an estimated twenty thousand private contractors who’d streamed into Iraq over the past few months, looking to reap a share of the riches in this latest corporate El Dorado. The company was running so many protective and assault teams in-country that it had taken over and fortified a large storeroom in the basement of the Hamra Hotel to warehouse a cache of rifles, handguns, fragmentation grenades, rocket launchers, flash-bangs and the other weaponry and supplies needed to keep its resupply lines open. Official U.S. military personnel might be short on bulletproof vests and armor to reinforce their vehicles, but the private contractors lacked for nothing.

      “There’s a helipad a few blocks from here in the Green Zone,” Ladwell said. “That’s where we’ll rendezvous with the chopper.”

      “Got it,” Hannah said. “I’m just going to take a run up to the roof to use the sat phone, but otherwise I’m ready.”

      “A satellite call now? Is that necessary?”

      “It’s just a quick one to my son back in the States,” Hannah replied, not that it was any of his business. It was superstition on her part, just like the good luck charm she always carried on these missions. If she died, she wanted one of the last voices she heard to be her eight-year-old son’s, and she wanted Gabriel to know she’d been thinking of him at the end. Making that potentially final call was part of her pre-op ritual. If you anticipated disaster, it wouldn’t happen—that’s what she told herself. In the past, it had been the unexpected nightmares, like losing custody of her child, that had blindsided her. Now, she never doubted the worst was possible, but if she visualized it, maybe she could dodge it.

      “You can’t mention where you are,” Ladwell warned her.

      Well, du-uh…

      “I know that. This isn’t my first time to the prom, you know.”

      “So they tell me.” The team leader’s voice betrayed the same skepticism he’d shown from the moment the team was first assembled five days earlier, despite the fact that at twenty-eight, Hannah was neither its youngest nor its least experienced member.

      It wasn’t personal, she knew. Ladwell, like most of the ex-special forces grunts she worked with, couldn’t seem to shake the military mindset that women didn’t belong on the front lines of battle. This team and its mission had no official status, however, so the usual rules didn’t apply. The whole point of hiring private contractors was to allow governments to distance themselves from unpalatable tasks. The real battle, as far as the Washington political spin doctors were concerned, was the public relations battle. Passing messy jobs to off-the-radar civilian contractors made for handy deniability later if things turned sticky.

      Despite Ladwell’s doubts, Hannah was no hothouse flower. She might have dark-eyed, exotic looks and a lithe, athletic figure on which even a T-shirt and cargo pants hung well enough to attract leering glances, but she’d spent six years as a patrol and undercover cop on the mean streets of Los Angeles, and then the last year and a half doing freelance security work. She didn’t need coddling and she was more than capable of taking care of herself when things got hairy.

      She also knew her way around the Middle East, having spent nearly every summer of her youth in Beirut, Dubai and Amman with her paternal grandparents and other overseas Greek relatives who ran various family businesses in the region, some of which dated back to the turn of the last century.

      “We are descendants of Ulysses,” Grandpa Demetrious liked to say on those evenings when Hannah would sit with him and her grandmother on their terrace overlooking Beirut’s Corniche, a warm Mediterranean breeze stirring the papery red bougainvillea and fragrant white jasmine that draped the balcony trellises. “Our family has always wandered the sea in search of its fortune. Sometimes the wind blows us good luck, sometimes not so good, but we sail on nevertheless.”

      Hannah’s personal wind of fortune had blown her back to the Middle East once more when Brandywine management had overruled Ladwell’s objections to having a woman on the team. Hannah had done work for them before, she’d handled herself well, and with so much security business opening up these days, resources were stretched thin. And then, there was the clincher: she was the only Arabic speaker in their freelancer database who was available when the call came. Since the contract specs called for at least one member who spoke the language, either she was in or they didn’t get the job. End of story.

      “I’ll be downstairs in twenty minutes,” she told Ladwell.

      “Don’t be late.”

      Hannah scowled. Yeah, right. Like she’d be sitting back, eating bonbons and watching her nail polish dry while the rest of the team got its kit together and headed out.

      Dropping the receiver back in the cradle, she grabbed her GlobalSat phone and headed out into the hallway and up the stairs to the hotel’s rooftop to make her call to Gabriel.

      CHAPTER

       2

      Boston, Massachusetts

      Beantown was in the grip of a stifling summer heat wave that crackled with the electric charge of an imminent thunderstorm. Sweaty, lethargic pedestrians dragged themselves through the streets, ignoring blue-black clouds that had shown up like violent bruises on the heavy-laden sky. It was too hot to hurry for shelter, too humid to care about the approaching afternoon tempest.

      Patrick Burton Fitzgerald stood high overhead at the windows of his fifty-third-floor offices in the John Hancock Tower, gazing down on Trinity Church, the Charles River and the gracious shops and tree-lined avenues of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. The Hancock office complex was entirely encased in glass, so that the windows on which he rested his clenched fists ran floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall.

      Fitzgerald had never considered himself a violent man. At the moment, however, he trembled with the kind of rage that could spark murder. If he got his hands on the bastard who had ordered his daughter’s kidnapping, he would cut his throat without hesitation or regret. How dare these people use Amy as a pawn in their power games?

      Fitzgerald wasn’t naïve. He knew that Americans were less than universally loved in some parts of the world, and he could sometimes even understand why that might be. He wasn’t some ugly American who thought that U.S. citizenship gave an automatic right to megalomania. He recognized that other people might interpret facts differently than his compatriots, and that other countries’ national interests might not always dovetail with those of the United States. Some conflicts were inevitable.

      Unlike many of his business peers, he had grave doubts about the current campaign in Iraq. Although he hadn’t joined street marches to protest the war, he had made phone calls to members of Congress and other friends in the administration to express his concern that the legitimate hunt for Osama bin Laden and others responsible for acts of terror against America was being hijacked by an obsessive preoccupation with Saddam Hussein who, for all his brutality, hardly posed the threat to this country that other bad actors out there did.

      Fitzgerald was a moderate Republican, economically conservative but not without a sense of noblesse oblige. He considered himself cosmopolitan, politically astute and culturally sensitive. In addition to numerous domestic charities, he donated significant sums to international refugee assistance, Third World education and health care for the planet’s poorest wretches. Fitzgerald and his wife Katherine had also raised their five children to understand their responsibility to give back to a world that had been uncommonly generous to the Fitzgeralds. In light of the disaster that had befallen them now, however, he found himself rethinking the wisdom of that approach. Had they somehow gone overboard with Amy, their youngest?

      A brutal rage seized him once more. If he weren’t so wretched with fear, he might be appalled at having been reduced to the same level of animal passion as the terrorists who’d taken his daughter. To hell with civility, however. He wanted them all dead.

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