“Wait,” Nicholas said, and she ignored him, then reluctantly slowed.
Mike could smell him, that fine Nicholas scent that was his and his alone, but more than that, she felt him, felt him drawing closer to her. She knew he was leaning in, felt his warm breath on her cheek.
“No, not a word, do you hear me? No pathetic excuses, no going on about what a mistake that was.”
“Okay. Shall I?”
“Shall you what?”
“Tell you to fix your ponytail? It’s rather lopsided.”
Mike grabbed her hair and pulled it back into place and slipped the band back on.
“I guess your shirt needs to be tucked in again, too.”
She shoved her shirt back into her trousers, called out, “Dillon, we’re coming,” and she stalked away from him, going around the teenagers, leaving him to listen to the boy with the broken arm laugh like a hyena since he was happily floating on pain meds.
61
KNIGHT TO F3
The White House
Callan had spent half the evening on the phone—talking either to the president or to Ari, or the head of the Iranian security services, who swore up and down his government had nothing to do with the reactors turning on. She wanted to tell him he was a lying moron, but of course she didn’t. It drove her mad, but denial was woven into their brains, par for the course. Then who did know about the reactors? But he didn’t have an answer to that.
A big muckety-muck had ordered someone to push the button and keep pushing. The Israelis had taken one look at the Iranian landscape lit up like a series of way stations across the desert and started planning a preemptive offensive, launching drones and preparing their battlements, which made the Iranians move more troops into place, shuffling their missile batteries around for the best offensive. How long would the Iron Dome last under a true barrage of nuclear warheads? Not long, and the collapse would be immediate around the entire region.
It was all happening lightning-quick, too, a match set to a fuse, flaring to life and settling in to burn fast and hot. If they didn’t nip it in the bud right here, right now, too many people to count would be dead.
The talks had fallen apart, no great surprise there, considering one of the parties was lying big-time. What had started as Bradley’s hopeful road to lasting peace was fast turning into a fistfight to see who would kill the other first. Again.
The president had ended up stalking out. He was now flying back to the United States on Air Force One, expected to land by ten in the morning. She hoped his blood pressure hadn’t spiked too high. She assumed she’d get a royal ass-chewing simply because she was handy, and given her opinions on the Middle East talks were diametrically opposed to his, that would make him even more pissed off to have her proven right. And then he’d have a nice long ride to lay into her on their way to the Yorktown event. Given he was the president of the United States, she couldn’t slug him.
She stayed in the Situation Room, her cup of strong black tea at her elbow, watching the movements across the region. The domino effect of the nuclear facilities coming online was a wonder to behold. Every country who’d been at the table in Geneva—from Saudi Arabia to Russia to Israel—was scrambling for position. The reports had been filtering in for the past few hours—major movement in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen. The ISIS media machine had been on Twitter promising attacks. Hezbollah and the Palestinians were openly calling for the Israelis’ immediate surrender, threatening attacks on the Gaza Strip, threatening to bomb Tel Aviv. Israel wouldn’t hold back for very long.
And, of course, this was what Iran was waiting for. Provocation. Why had they pushed it now? She knew they didn’t yet have a nuclear weapon, so why?
She had to fix this. She had to stop it. And she had no idea how she was going to pull it off.