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He and Benjamin go through the countdown one more time, and he aims the monocular device at the near window, the light-green reticle centered on it, the interior GPS software keeping it right on target.
“Thirty seconds,” Benjamin says.
“Roger that,” Liam says, as he pulls the trigger.
A laser beam flashes out from his device—invisible to the naked eye—and strikes the center of the window. He keeps it in place, and Benjamin continues the countdown all the way to “Zero, away.”
Liam keeps quiet.
Aiming.
A little flash of light from the horizon, like a quiet burst of heat lightning.
Now.
From the deck of the fishing ship on the other side of the horizon, a modified AGM-114R Hellfire Romeo bunker-buster missile is launched, and instantly locking on to the invisible targeting laser held in Liam’s hands, it punches through the stone cottage’s window and explodes less than a second later.
Liam sees the windows and door blow out of the cottage, and the stone roof crumple and then collapse in a burst of smoke and gray dust. The shock wave even makes his paddleboard sway in the warm water.
Benjamin says, “Liam?”
Liam puts the aiming device down, starts paddling away from the destroyed cottage.
Liam says, “Nothing finer.”
CHAPTER 25
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
NOA HIMEL SITS by herself in a wing chair next to a wide wooden desk in a comfortable, first-story home office in a two-story brick home in the Bluemont neighborhood of Arlington, just about fifteen minutes away from Langley. Built-in bookcases are filled with leather-bound volumes and antiques from Turkey, Greece, and southern France rest in decorative cases. Framed photos and certificates hang from the walls. She’s pulled her chair opposite an old-fashioned swivel chair and away from the desk so it’s facing the open door.
In her career she’s met contacts in dingy cafés reeking of cigarette smoke, alleyways ankle-deep in raw sewage, and the top of parking garages where a sharp wind always seemed to cut her through.
Tonight’s meeting place is definitely a step up.
She’s looking into the entryway of the fine house. A stairway goes up from the main front door, and on the other side is a living room, dining room, and empty kitchen.
Noa patiently waits. Once she worked with an operator named Callaghan, who could spend hours like this, just waiting. She asked him one long night how he spent the time, and laughing, he said, “My grandmother told me I should take time like this to contemplate my sins.”
And she replied, “Ever run out of time?”
“Never,” he replied, with a smile.
Poor Callaghan, she thought, killed in a Taliban-led ambush three years ago in some now-forgotten FOB—Forward Operating Base—in the ’stan.
The front door opens. Noa checks the time. It’s ten past eleven at night.
She also checks the 9mm Beretta pistol in her lap.
A man comes in, nearly stumbling. He takes off his rain jacket, tries twice then succeeds in hanging it up on a coatrack, and he moves to the kitchen before he seems to sense a presence in his office.
He comes in, carrying a leather briefcase. “What … who … what the hell is going on here?”
Noa reaches over, switches on a green-shaded lamp. The room comes into sharper focus.
“Joshua Mooreland,” she says. “So nice to make your acquaintance.”
He steps in closer. Late fifties. Dark-gray suit, white shirt, unbuttoned, dark-yellow necktie undone. Eyes blinking. Thick gray-and-white hair, metal-rimmed eyeglasses, fleshy jowls, red face.
