Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

Sigler felt compelled to speak, if only to end the awkward silence. “Brought her in? I thought your new boss put the kibosh on outsourcing.”


It was no secret that Domenick Boucher, the new director of the CIA, under orders from the President, had put an end to the former administration’s practice of outsourcing the detainment, rendition and interrogation of suspected terrorists. It was partly as a way to restore accountability to the relevant agencies and partly to stop the hemorrhage of taxpayer dollars into what some journalists had taken to calling the ‘terror-industrialist complex.’ The President had made other changes too, some public and some under the radar, to streamline the nation’s intelligence-gathering apparatus and repair the lingering damage to America’s public image following too many incidents of abuse, brutality and torture—oft times with official sanction.

The President, a former Army Ranger, was by no means soft on national security issues, but he did have what one primary opponent had disparagingly called ‘an obsolete sense of integrity.’ Old-fashioned maybe, but not obsolete. Evidently the American people had liked the idea of a leader with integrity.

Klein shook his head. “This is different. But, I should let Sasha explain.”

When she failed to pick up the cue a second time, the CIA man laid a hand gently on her forearm, and as if speaking to a young child, he said: “Sasha, why don’t you tell the men about your work?”

The woman looked up suddenly, the spell broken. She glanced around the table as if just realizing that she wasn’t alone. “Uh, I do the math.”

Sigler stifled a laugh, but he noticed that Parker was now sitting up a little straighter. Daniel Parker, a self-confessed science geek, was the antithesis of most African-American stereotypes: a man who would count it a greater honor debating astrophysics with Neil deGrasse Tyson than playing one-on-one with Allen Iverson…though if push came to shove, he would probably acquit himself equally well in either situation.

“Sasha is, among other things, a cryptanalyst,” explained Klein. “We might have stopped outsourcing the dirty work, but we can’t afford to keep people with her talents on the payroll.”

Sigler connected the dots. “So we found some kind of coded message.”

Klein pursed his lips. “Not exactly.”

“This is what you found,” Sasha declared, as if abruptly deciding to take an interest in the conversation. She turned the laptop around and showed them the screen, and the image on it that had so captivated her.

The display showed what Sigler could only assume was a digital copy of one of the documents they had recovered during the previous night’s raid. It didn’t look familiar, but then he hadn’t really been looking when they’d done the collecting. He recognized the delicate curves of Arabic script, but there was a block of writing in the middle that looked like nothing he’d ever seen before. The letters might have been Greek or perhaps Cyrillic, but interspersed among the not-quite-familiar letters were other shapes that looked almost like Chinese characters:





“What does it say?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha replied, looking genuinely bothered by the admission.

The CIA man broke in impatiently. “It’s evident from the accompanying message that the enemy does know what it says, and that it’s critical to the development of a biological weapon.”

Sigler had been in the Unit long enough that such a declaration no longer surprised him. The stakes were always high. America’s enemies were bent on acquiring bio-weapons or loose nukes. It was the Unit’s job—his job—to nip those deadly aspirations in the bud.

“The intel you collected,” Klein continued, “doesn’t tell us what exactly, but it does tell us where: an old Republican Guard depot about thirty klicks northeast of Samarra.”

Sigler reviewed his mental map of the region, but the area didn’t ring any bells. Samarra lay between Baghdad and Tikrit, along the eastern leg of the Sunni Triangle, where nearly all of the insurgent activity had been focused lately. East of the triangle, there was a whole lot of nothing, all the way to the Iranian border.

“We had no idea this place even existed; it doesn’t show up on any of our satellite imagery, going back all the way to the First Gulf War, so we have to assume that it was decommissioned sometime following the end of the war with Iran. We should have a UAV over the site within the hour, but we’re thinking most of it’s underground. Saddam probably buried it to hide it from UN weapons inspectors. That’s probably why we didn’t find it sooner.” Klein shifted forward in his chair.

Here it comes, thought Sigler.

“The window of opportunity on this one is narrow. Once they figure out their couriers got nabbed, if they haven’t already, they’ll pick up and move. We need to hit this place ASAP.” Another pause.

“Tonight.”