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months ago they located and apprehended the real Osama bin Laden. It was done very quietly, with their captive taken from a sprawling banana plantation in Guatemala andbrought to this island for interrogation. Osama had been living under the false identity of a retired textbook publisher from Tel Aviv. Funny, huh? He had a Guatemalan wife, and he had four children who believed themselves to be half-Israeli. The CIA team raided his plantation in the middle of the night and whisked him away. To cover their tracks, they even sent a series of ransom demands as if theywere local thugs. No one suspected a thing.
    If I didn’t hate those pricks so much, I’d applaud them for their investigative brilliance.
    Since then, the CIA has scored a surprising number of big-ticket arrests of actual al-Qaeda terrorists, thanks to information coerced from bin Laden by the splinter cell. This resulted in a new veneer for an agency that has taken a lot of drubbing over the last—oh,I don’t know … forever. Congress was so happy with them that when it came time to review the annual budget, they pretty much handed the Agency a blank check.
    When Mr. Church and our crew found out about this through some creatively targeted computer hacking, we decided that Osama should come live with us. We weren’t here to “rescue” him per se. Hardly. Nor were we unduly concerned about the violationsto his civil and human rights. Normally, that kind of thing torques my shorts. Less so in this case.
    All we wanted was to turn him into an information source for us. There have been rumors in the intelligence pipeline for a couple of years now that something big was coming. Something massive. Something tied to the Seven Kings. The CIA splinter cell caught wind of it, too, but they dismissed it.The Kings were not on their to-do list. The Kings case belonged to the DMS.
    So close.
    So damn close.
    What was the big project they had in development? Was there, in fact, a project at all? Bin Laden would have those answers. The King of Lies would know the truth.
    If he was alive to tell us.
    Now he was cooling meat.
    Balls.

 
    Interlude Two
    The Imperial Condominiums
    Unit 6A, Edgewater Drive

    Corpus Christi, Texas
    Four Years Ago
    The girl’s name was Boy.
    It was the only thing anyone ever called her. If she had a real name, it was buried in the dirt of the past. She wouldn’t answer to anything else.
    Boy.
    She was closing in on her twenty-fifth birthday. The last ten years of her life were the only years she cared to remember. The decade before that belonged to a different person.The decade before that belonged to a different story. A horror story.
    No one sane mentioned her early years. No one smart asked her about them.
    Doctor Pharos was the only one who could have that conversation with her, but he never did. He’d been the one to take her away from it, so he didn’t need to comment on it.
    Because he’d taken her away from that life, and because of the things he haddone while taking her away, they were connected. Bonded.
    Family.
    Doctor Pharos and Boy.
    Not the Boy. Just Boy.
    They shared no other obvious connections. Not gender, not race, not cultural background. Certainly not any religious ties, except that neither of them prayed to a god or believed one existed.
    The reality of their connection was something about which they never really conversed. Nota philosophical dissection of it. Not a deconstruction of motive or sources of gratifications. It existed, and they knew it. It worked, and they worked with it. It grew, and they cultivated it.
    Their connection was terror.
    It was something Doctor Pharos required of her.
    It was something she existed to provide for him.
    And it was the source of her joy.
    Doctor Pharos loaded her like a bulletin the weapon of his intention and fired her over and over again at the targets of his need. He did this in the past in the service of the people they had both served. That time had passed, and now he did it