Free Deeper Than Red (Red Returning Trilogy) by Sue Duffy Page B

supervisor. In answer, the man had simply whistled a tune that Vlad recognized immediately.
    “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Chapter 9
    T hough the president’s cold had advanced to bronchitis over the weekend, he remained in the Oval Office that Monday afternoon, impervious to the fever and chills wracking his body. At that moment, little else mattered but the call he’d just taken from CIA Director Don Bragg. The Israeli Mossad, with the aid of enhanced satellite imaging, had positively identified known terrorists operating at an old mining site in the Ural Mountains of Russia. American undercover operatives immediately dispatched to a local village had confirmed unusual military-type transports to and from the site over several months. None of the locals would yield more information than that, their fears worn clearly on their faces.
    It was readily apparent to the agents on the ground, however, that something was being manufactured or at least assembled deep inside the mountain. Though the area appeared to be swept clean of evidence, it had taken only one empty canister carelessly discarded in a nearby ravine—and the identity of one on-site terrorist—to ignite a firestorm in the bunkers of Israeli intelligence.
    The terrorist was a Palestinian associated with Volynski’s forces and possessing a near-legendary proficiency in escaping one Mossad dragnet after another. But it wasn’t the terrorist that troubled Noland most. It was the lab report on the residue inside the canister. That report, now spread before Noland, was accompanied by a hastily supplied brief on the deadly nerve agent sarin. Odorless, colorless, delivered through warheads and other explosive devices, capable of death to thousands throughout the bomb site, outlawed by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. Sarin was a weapon of mass destruction now in the hands of a terrorist once complicit in Ivan Volynski’s attempt to annihilate Israel and launch serial domestic assaults on the United States. Most notably, though, satellite surveillance had detected a surge of activity at the Urals camp beginning last Thursday—the day Russian President Dimitri Gorev was assassinated.
    Noland lifted his weary eyes from the reports and tracked a splinter of sunlight from the windows behind his desk to a spot on the presidential seal woven into the carpet before him. “What’s happening?” he murmured to himself. “Who are these people and where are they shipping their poison?” His eyes lingered on the seal, reading
E pluribus unum
on the scroll tucked in the eagle’s beak.
Out of many, one.
He alone held the nation’s highest office. A mere human, sweating off a fever of 101 degrees while trying to compose a proper response to one or more weapons of mass destruction possibly inbound to the land of the free.
    Could the Israelis be wrong about this? Overreacting? But they weren’t known to be. They were, however, often unwilling to share intelligence. Why now? What else did they know?
    The buzzer on his phone sounded. “Yes,” he answered.
    “Sir,” his secretary began, “a diplomatic pouch has arrived from the Russian Embassy with an envelope inside tagged with instructions to deliver it only to you. It was marked
urgent.”
    Noland rested one elbow against the desk and rested his pounding head in his hand. “It was also marked
personal
, sir,” she added.
    “Bring it in, please,” he told her, still thumbing through pages on the lethal effects of sarin on the human body. “I assume security has already swept it.”
    “Of course, sir. It’s clean.”
    “Very well.” He hung up and slumped back in his chair, resisting the urge to retire to the residence and the soft sheets of his four-poster bed. His wife would bring him chicken soup with his antibiotics and encourage him to forget, for just a while, that he was
Out of many, one.
    Rona Arant walked at her usual time-is-of-the-essence pace across the room and stood before the president, who