“We were followed to my place and, to give you and Amber more time, we decided to stay longer. Everything was fine, or so I thought, until she stabbed me with a needle full of some kind of powerful drug. Whatever it was damn near killed me. She nearly OD’d me. My housekeeper saved my life.” There was a pause. “She tried to kill me, Hawk.”
“Are you certain it was her? We were drugged here, too. But it’s Dilaver who did it.”
“I’m sure. We were sleeping in…my bed,” Brad said. “I…still can’t believe it.”
Jesus. Hawk didn’t need Brad to paint a picture of what had happened. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I’m not sure what’s happening. Amber and the bomb are missing, too. Look, I’m meeting my contact via video and have to go, but I’ll bring this up. We’ll figure out what’s happening here. I’ll call you as soon as we have a game plan. Are you doing okay?”
There was a short bitter laugh from Brad. “Barring the fact that I’m still at the hospital, I suppose I am.”
“I’m sorry,” Hawk said again.
“Not your fault. I should have gone after the details in her file more. I had a gut feeling about her CIA background, so I did another check with another source. I found out recently that she was saved by the CIA after being abused for two years in the whorehouses, and the file mentioned that she was part of Program Precious. I had assumed that was the name of the rescue operation, but now I’m not too sure. You do have CIA connections, right? Maybe you can find out what this program is and get a tie-in. There’s something wrong with her, Hawk. I woke up when she answered her cell phone. I thought it might have been you or Amber calling. Then she stabbed me with that thing and…she was muttering the same line over and over again.”
“What was it?”
“It’s that poem. ‘Things fall apart’…do you know it?”
Hawk took out a pen and jotted down the line. “That’s it? Things fall apart? I think I know it. Sounds familiar.”
“It’s from a famous poem. I swear I heard her saying that line as I tried to understand what was happening.”
“Okay. Keep your phone by you. I’ll be in touch.” Hawk ended the call. He turned to Diamond. “There’s another woman missing and I think she’s betrayed Amber and me.”
“Give Jed the details.”
Hawk and the others climbed into the huge chopper. There were two systems technicians, in familiar fatigue greens, working and monitoring the computers.
“We’re clear, sir,” one of them said.
“Good.”
The large LCD screen was state-of-the-art. Jed’s image was clearer than the one Hawk had talked to on Amber’s laptop. Now he could even see the flecks of silver in the other man’s eyes in the close-up. He was back in his usual faded jeans jacket but the background was a sumptuously decorated hotel room. His expression remained impassive as Hawk gave a detailed account of the state of the crates and Brad’s phone call.
Hawk waited after he was done. He was getting used to Jed McNeil’s odd long silences. The others standing with him must be, too, since they kept quiet. He always had a feeling that Jed was computing and simplifying, because when he spoke up after these silences, he always seemed to be able to reduce to bare bones the most complicated facts.
Jed looked down and Hawk could heard him shuffling some papers. “The summit meeting took place successfully, with only one minor incident. A woman was caught with an exploding device. It wasn’t our target weapon,” he said quietly. “Computation of seventy-five percent success of our operation, but that’s without the detail of Llallana Noretski. The woman in custody was obviously the decoy Greta mentioned to Amber Hutchens in their meeting. Llallana was the one going in with the bomb.”
“But the note demanded the target weapon and if they had it, why take Amber?” Hawk asked.
It was just a trick of the camera setup, but Jed’s light eyes seemed to turn colder. “McMillan, you like Miss Hutchens. It’s the only way to get you to do what they want—that is, go back to Velesta without finishing your mission. Meanwhile, Llallana takes off to the summit with the bomb.”
“One question. How’s Lily going through all the security without a pass?”
“There’s a very famous art exhibit unveiling in eighteen hours. I’ll let you make a guess as to who might be part of the entourage.”
Hawk took a deep breath. “Too coincidental.”
“There was a reason they didn’t kill you, Mr. McMillan. While you’re busy saving Miss Hutchens, the bomb will go off. You can’t be at two places at the same time.” Jed looked down at his papers again. “Granted, there’s something else going on here that would explain Amber’s girlfriend’s motives. Bradford Sun dug up something important that had been left out of previous classified files. Project Precious.”
“Brad said he thought it was a CIA-headed operation to rescue underage prostitutes.”
Jed shook his head. “Negative. This was a super-classified project. Very short summary—it’s short for Project Precious Gems. The last word sounds familiar to you? The CIA wanted trained operatives with the same talents unique to GEM operatives, except totally under its control. GEM, as you know, is independent, and the CIA was interested in finding out its secrets. Project Precious failed in copying or modifying NOPAIN, the GEM system, but things don’t go to waste in the CIA. Project Precious has morphed into what I know is a sleeper cell program. Trainees aren’t exactly operatives; they are embedded with sleeper commands that are activated with a repeated phrase.”
“Things fall apart,” Hawk muttered. He was beginning to feel the whole cloak-and-dagger world ought to explode with a certain undetectable bomb. Lily—a sleeper? He couldn’t even wrap his head around it right now. “So she’s been around Amber all these years waiting to be…activated?”
“She probably wasn’t aware of it, or only vaguely. Sleeper commands come in slowly, each one triggering the operative into a deeper state of awareness. By the time she’s fully activated, she’ll be ready to finish her assignment.”
Hawk shook his head in disgust. “I don’t even want to know how they did this to Lily.”
