The Shield of Darius Read online

  Ben paused, expecting the murmur to again rise in the audience behind him, but hearing only stunned silence. Television crews scrambled to get a better angle on the witness’s face, and the Senators leaned forward in their seats.

  “Seated behind me are the families of some of those Americans,” Ben continued. “Mary Cannon from Portland, Oregon. Isabelle Ramirez from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mark Douglas from Dallas, Texas, and John Ashland from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their spouses and twenty-five other American citizens were being held as hostages in central Tehran as part of an operation the Iranians referred to as the Shield of Darius. I say ‘held’ because a month ago that prison was destroyed, and all who were in it killed by an air attack carried out or sanctioned by agents of the United States Government. You read about it in the papers and saw it on the news as an attack on a school and hospital, but those who carried out the raid knew exactly what it was and who was there.”

  As he paused again, he did hear the questioning murmur behind him, but the Senators sat in silence, each recalling recent pleas for help by the families of tourists who had disappeared while abroad. The Senator from Arizona finally leaned into his microphone, speaking in a low, sandy voice.

  “These are most serious allegations. I assume you are prepared to offer some proof to substantiate them.”

  “I know this,” the witness said,” because I was in the prison with them. I escaped shortly before the attack and with the help of our Russian allies made it to safety.”

  The murmur behind him rose to an excited chatter that the Chairman silenced with his gavel.

  “And with your indulgence, Mr. Chairman,” Ben Sager continued, glancing again at his notes, “allow me to start at the beginning....”

  CREDITS

  Cover Design by Jillian J. Farnsworth

  Other novels by Allen Kent

  Backwater

  River of Light and Shadow

  Guardians of the Second Son

  Unit 1 Novels

  The Weavers of Meanchey

  The Wager

  Opening Chapter of

  The Weavers of Meanchey

  A Unit I Novel

  Allen Kent

  …a country home near Ashburn, Virginia

  The encrypted message from the Director of Central Intelligence reached Fisher’s computer the very morning he had been wondering aloud to Anita if the Weaver affair had amounted to anything. The message was in the Director’s terse style: long enough to give the essentials; short enough to be enticing.

  Re: Weavers memo of five months ago. New chatter coming out of NSA concerning a CIA source who disappeared in Southeast Asia in the late 60s. Name: Jim Thompson. You may remember him. Intel indicates that before disappearing, Thompson sent security-critical info to a CIA contact that was not received, but recently discovered. Advisors here see this as old news – unrelated to current security interests. They advise not to pursue. Don’t wish to countermand and may be seeing connections that don’t exist. But Han at NSA has asked to see all communication involving Jim Thompson. Coincidence?

  New chatter involves retired agent, Eric Compton, who you no doubt remember. He and Thompson were friends in Bangkok. Now lives in Remington, VA. Was contacted by a Davis Eckerson, indicating Eckerson has a message for Compton from Thompson. Davis meets with Compton tomorrow. Is now at Comfort Inn in Culpeper, VA. May be a dead end, but worth finding out. Contact if more info needed.

  Fisher transferred the message to Anita’s console. “What do you think?” he asked.

  She quickly scanned the Director’s note. “His advisors may be right,” she said, pushing her chair away from the computer. “This looks like old news. But wasn’t Han the NSA man mentioned in that Weavers message?”

  Fisher pecked quickly at his keyboard, then leaned back and squinted through the bottom of his bifocals. “Here’s the last note from the Director. ‘Received anonymous message addressed “Director’s Eyes Only.” Asks that we investigate relationship between Bradley Han at NSA, Marshall Ding at a Dallas firm called FedTegrity, and a group called the Weavers. Advises we do so quickly and with great caution. People here think a hoax. I’m not certain. Please follow up.’ In addition to the people inside thinking this wasn’t serious, I suspect the Director wasn’t excited about having his people investigate someone inside the NSA. So he asked us to do it.”

  Anita nodded. “But what makes the Director think this new information might be related?”

  “Intuition,” Fisher said. “Mention of Han, Jim Thompson, and weavers in the two memos. Thompson was sometimes referred to as the Thai Silk King.”

  “You knew him?”

  “More like, knew of him. Everyone in the Agency knew about Jim Thompson. And I knew Eric Compton pretty well. Good man.”

  “And what does your intuition tell you?” Anita asked.

  Fisher’s aged chuckle rasped like boots on gravel. “Thompson, Compton, Weavers? Gotta be more than coincidence. There’s something to this.”

  Anita wheeled her chair back up to her console. “Then I’d better send this to Adam Zak,” she said.

  ONE

  The blue ball skipped midway up the front wall, arched high above mid-court where it barely grazed the ceiling, then dropped softly against the glass of the back wall, eighteen inches above the floor. It hit the varnished maple of the court surface with a muted plop that signaled it wasn’t going to rebound more than six or seven inches. Adam was ready. He took two quick shuffle steps to his left, reached behind the ball with racquet poised, and snapped his wrist as he swept his arm forward, catching the ball four inches from the wood surface. The blue sphere didn’t rise an inch as it traveled the thirty feet into the front left corner, hitting the joint of the front and side walls so perfectly it died instantly, dropping lifeless without so much as a dribble.

  Dreu Sason bent forward with hands on knees and glanced sideways at her opponent, a drop of perspiration sliding down her nose and beading for a moment before she brushed it away with the back of her racquet hand, then wiped her forehead with a wristband.

  “I don’t know what it’s going to take,” she panted. “That lob was almost perfect – and on your blind side. And you still got it.”

  Adam forced the knuckles of both hands into the middle of his back, twisting from side to side to relieve the tension in his aching muscles. “Don’t know what you’re complaining about,” he said. “You won the first game with a shot just like that. Everything I know, I learned from you.”

  “Yeah – right...” she laughed, straightening and walking to the door that opened into the corridor separating the racquetball courts from the fitness center’s central gymnasium. Adam followed, admiring from behind the shapely hips outlined so perfectly by her thigh-length Lycra shorts and the sculpted legs that were at least half of her slender, six-foot frame. He swatted her playfully on the butt with his racquet as they walked toward the dressing rooms.

  “Time for lunch today?”

  “Can’t. Some of us have to work. We have people coming in from Washington this morning for meetings that will last most of the day. In fact, I need to head right into the city as soon as I get cleaned up. I’ll call you tonight.”

  In the hallway outside the dressing room doors, he turned her toward him, kissing her lightly and looking for a moment into her hypnotic eyes. They were the color of liquid caramel with bursts of gold radiating from the pupils and had been the first thing he noticed about her when the membership director first introduced them, a meeting that had been at his request.

  “I understand you’re a racquetball player,” he’d said, extending a hand. “I’m Adam Zak and I’m looking for a partner who comes in about six.”

  “There are a number of guys who play early,” she said. “They might be better competition.” The beautiful eyes were set under dark, carefully shaped brows into a finely-featured face of uncertain ethnicity: smooth light brown skin with silky black hair, pulled back into a single braid that fell midwa
y down her back. Her mouth was full and wide and, when she smiled, displayed perfect teeth. Not at all what he had expected from the Fisher dossier that had led him to rent the house in McKinney, Texas, and join Lifetime Fitness to arrange this chance introduction.

  “I hear the guys come in already paired up – that you’re a pretty good player, and usually choose to play whoever’s available. I’m available this morning….”

  She had shrugged her consent and led him to an empty court. One item in the dossier was right. She was a mean racquetball player. And though Adam had always considered himself pretty decent, they split their first four games.

  “Rubber match tomorrow – same time?” he had asked as they left the court that first morning.

  She stopped outside the dressing rooms and considered the invitation for a long moment.

  “I think I’d like that,” she said finally, and they had been seeing each other now for nearly four months.

  To the gym’s other patrons, they had become the talk of the morning exercise crowd: the polite, distant woman with the striking figure and dark, natural beauty; and the tall, quiet newcomer with the black eye patch who looked like a younger, chestnut-haired version of actor Sam Elliot, complete with mustache. Since joining the center, Adam had been keeping his hair shoulder length and pulled back into a ponytail when he worked the cardio equipment or played racquetball.

  Now, as he pushed into the dressing room, he was thinking that he was becoming too fond of Dreu Sason. Definitely not part of the assignment. When he began his investigation of Marshall Ding, she was simply a name on a list of FedTegrity’s top-level employees: the senior female programmer and one who, on paper, looked like his best shot at getting information about her boss.

  And in its own way, Fisher’s profile information had been spot on: thirty-three and single; six feet tall and of mixed Indian and East European ancestry; former model, with a Stanford degree on computer analytics. But the file photo hardly did her justice and looked like a post office mug shot taken on a bad hair day. Not exactly Miss October. And according to the dossier, she had been pretty badly carved up by a stalker who purportedly was intent on disfiguring her. Adam fully anticipated that when they met, she would be trying to hide surgically-softened traces of a brutal knife attack. Plus, he had grown up in central Nebraska, and his corn-fed vision of a woman with a Stanford degree who developed computer security programs subconsciously added twenty pounds to the parts of her body that didn’t show in the file photo. When he asked the guy at Lifetime to introduce them, he expected a round-shouldered, slightly over-weight woman with unkempt hair and disfiguring facial scars, who used the morning workout in a vain attempt to tighten a drooping bottom and slim thighs that were getting away from her.

  That was not Dreu Sason. And as he veiled his surprise at their first meeting, he gave himself a mental kick in the pants for thinking like his uncle Max. When at age forty his aunt Olivia had shown serious interest in going back to school to become a veterinary technician, Max not only said “no,” but “hell, no,” and joked about it for the next two weeks until Olivia’s resolve crumbled.

  “Won’t have any wife of mine with her arm shoulder-deep up the south end of a north-bound heifer,” he laughed at a family get-together. But he never seemed to object to her driving the combine during the wheat harvest or slaughtering, hanging, and dressing-out a 200-pound hog. That somehow fit his image of how a bright, attractive, Midwestern woman should be spending her time. Adam had never aspired to be like uncle Max, and didn’t like the fact that he had allowed the kind of chauvinism Max enjoyed joking about to color his own thinking. Adam liked to call those errant thoughts Maxian Brain Farts.

  And now that he and Dreu had been seeing each other two or three times a week for four months, it was much more than her stunning good looks that was chipping away at his resolve to remain detached. The woman had a candor and genuineness that were completely disarming, and as their relationship moved from the racquetball court, to dinner together, toward greater intimacy, she stopped him one evening as he moved his hand under the back of her shirt and began to massage her bare shoulders.

  “Time for a little truth talk,” she said, backing away.

  He also retreated a step, wondering if she had somehow discovered that he was investigating Ding and FedTegrity.

  “Sorry if I over-stepped,” he said, his smile tight but apologetic. “I must have misread some cues.”

  “Oh, I know I was tossing out the cues,” she said quickly. “I just don’t want to have to deal with the OMG if you get too much farther into my clothes.”

  His smile softened and he separated from her by another step, looking her over critically. She was wearing a pair of figure-hugging jeans and a loose denim shirt with the tails hanging over her hips. “Everything I see looks perfect,” he said.

  Dreu nodded and cocked her head to one side. “It’s what you can’t see that you may have trouble with. And you’re getting there pretty fast.”

  “Okay…. Then let’s have your truth talk. I don’t want anything to be uncomfortable – for either of us.” They were in the entryway of her apartment and he led her into the living room and eased her onto one end of her olive-colored sofa, taking the other end with a knee propped up on the cushion between them.

  She tucked her legs beneath her and looked down at her lap, then directly into his uncovered eye.

  “You told me the first day we met at the gym that I had a familiar face, then joked that it wasn’t just a lame pick-up line. That you really did feel like you’d seen me before.”

  He nodded, letting her speak without interruption.

  “Well, you’ve probably seen me a dozen times on the end of the check-out stand at the supermarket. I modeled pretty successfully for six years….”

  The modeling wasn’t news, but when he saw her the first time, the face did seem uncomfortably familiar for a woman he was planning to turn into an informant. He rarely looked at the magazine racks and knew that if he had seen her there, it would only have been a quick impression. But a face like hers would have made one. Again he remained silent.

  “Do you remember reading or hearing about a model who was attacked by a stalker about eighteen months ago?”

  Finally – she was getting to the stalker incident. He did vaguely remembered the news item, but none of the details. Adam’s media intake consisted of a quick online review each morning of the local paper, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Practically no TV. But he thought the Times had featured a short piece…. He nodded an acknowledgment.

  Her mouth twisted into a wry smile. “That was me. The guy believed God told him I was destined to be his wife and have his children. I had to get a restraining order….” She watched Adam’s face for any sign he knew where the story was going and, seeing none, leaned back into the arm of the sofa and folded her hands in her lap. “…and when he figured out it wasn’t going to happen, he broke into my apartment and attacked me with a knife. Didn’t want to kill me. Just punish me for, as he put it, ‘putting my body on display.’ So he cut me up so no one else would want me.”

  Though Fisher’s dossier had forewarned him, Adam felt his throat tightened and eyes begin to moisten.

  “I’m so sorry,” he murmured. “How badly?”

  She raised her left hand to her right breast and placed her other hand across her stomach. “He slashed my breast almost in half – this way.” She drew her index finger from under her right arm over to the middle of her chest. “And he cut across my stomach where he thought my uterus was. Got more intestine than uterus, and some amazing surgeons were able to get everything stitched back together and in place. But he did manage to ruin the uterus and there are some pretty ugly scars.”

  Adam could think of only one thing to say. He straightened on the couch and moved his own hands to his lap. “May I see?” he asked.

  Her quick smile showed relief, and she slowly unbuttoned her shirt and lifted her bra. Her right brea
st, otherwise beautifully shaped, had a thick-edged crease that ran horizontally just below the dark circle of her nipple, with visible marks where the skin had been stapled together.

  She looked down at her chest. “They could have done more cosmetic surgery, but I didn’t want it. It is what it is, and I was getting sick of New York anyway. The pressures of schedule, the paparazzi that hovered outside every place I went, and the constant simpering attention of almost everyone. Plus, though most of the women who worked with me were intelligent, interesting people, we were treated as if we never had an original thought of our own and were no more than under-fed, pretty faces who had learned to strut.”

  Her comment added new odor to his brain fart.

  She lowered the bra and buttoned her shirt. “Even if they’d been able to get me back on the runway, I was ready to get out of there.”

  She pushed her hips forward on the sofa and unzipped her jeans, wriggling her red underwear low enough to reveal another knotted rope that ran from hip bone to hip bone.

  “He cut me top and bottom,” she said, pulling the jeans back up and giving him a “well, there you have it!” look.

  Adam pursed his lips, still looking at the beltline that covered the scar across her belly. When he picked Dreu Sason as a potential avenue to Marshall Ding, he should have asked Fisher for a more comprehensive bio.

  “Where is the guy now?” he asked.