No Survivors by Tom Cain

Author:Tom Cain
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Azizex666, Adventure
ISBN: 9780143116561
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

49

Kady Jones was reading e-mails, an affectionate smile on her face. A few days ago, two of her favorite people at Los Alamos, Henry Wong and Mae Lee, had got married. They’d gone on a honeymoon to Rome and, being techies, they hadn’t sent postcards home by snail mail. They’d found an Internet café instead. Mae’s message to Kady was chatty, detailed, and intimate: one close girlfriend to another. Henry’s had consisted of a couple of lines, assuring her that Rome was pretty cool, plus a bunch of digital holiday photos, with captions attached.

His favorite was a shot of Mae posing in a park on the Aventine Hill, with a view across the Tiber to the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. She looked great, her face suffused with a happiness that seemed to light up the whole shot.

“Man, am I one lucky bomb-geek!” he’d written on the caption.

Kady was looking at the shot on her lab computer, whose screen was far larger, with much better resolution than the one in the Roman café. So she noticed what Henry hadn’t, that there were two guys talking in the background of his shot, and the perspective made them look like weird midgets growing out of Mae’s armpit. Out of idle curiosity she zoomed in on them to take a closer look.

And then she gasped. “Holy shit!”

The man on the right was only vaguely recognizable, but his companion was all too familiar. If the two of them were having anything other than a casual, social conversation, this innocent holiday photograph had suddenly acquired a whole new level of significance.

She dialed a number in Washington. FBI Special Agent Tom Mulvagh, the man who’d supervised the operation at Gull Lake, had been transferred to D.C. to work on the secret team searching for the Russian bombs. They’d built up a good working relationship. She told him to expect an e-mail and waited a few seconds.

“Do you have the picture on your screen?”

“Yeah, thanks for sending me that, though e-mailing shots of hot broads is most often a guy kind of thing.”

Kady could picture Mulvagh’s grin. He liked to kid around a little when the situation allowed. She didn’t have any problem with that.

“Very funny, Tom. That ‘broad,’ as you call her, is Mae Wong, the beautiful, sensitive, and highly intelligent wife of my associate Henry Wong. And she’s not what I want you to look at. Go in on the two guys . . .”

“What, the ones in her armpit?”

“Exactly. . . . Recognize them?”

There was silence on the line while Mulvagh thought, then: “The one on the right looks familiar.”

“That’s what I thought,” agreed Kady. “I’m pretty sure I saw his picture in a magazine. He’s that general. His assistant got killed in the park in D.C.”

“Vermulen,” said Mulvagh. “Right, I remember. But what’s the significance to you or me?”

“Well, it’s not him that caught my attention. It’s the other one, with the darker hair. He’s Dr. Francesco Riva. He’s Italian, came over here

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