A Kiss to Kill Read Online Free PDF Page A

Arabic message.
Zero hour approaches! The garden of paradise beckons. The trigger will arrive tomorrow. Praise God and do His will!
    As he read, Alex’s blood ran cold.
    Normally he was a skeptic when it came to intelligence gathered from unsourced, intercepted e-mails. Hell, it could be some ten-year-old punk hacker in Poughkeepsie who’d sent it to his buddies as a joke. Even the zero-hour thing, a deliberate allusion to the infamous 9-11 chatter, was by now a cliché, used by every terrorist wannabe in the world. But Alex had to admit, this message had a certain ring of authenticity.
    “Let’s assume NSA’s right and it is real,” Quinn began grimly. “Then it looks like their next target is D.C. Not terribly surprising. The question is—”
    “—what is this trigger they’re talking about?” Alex finished.
    Darcy gave voice to what they all were thinking. “A nuclear trigger?”
    “Do these assholes never give up?”
    Three months ago, the al Sayika cell that kidnapped Dr. Cappozi had attempted to release a horrific Armageddon virus in several U.S. cities, planning to kill millions of people in retaliation for one of their leaders being martyred in the Sudan. Quinn’s team had managed to stop the massacre in the nick of time.
    “A dirty bomb?” Kick suggested.
    A chorus of curses sounded around the table.
    Quinn said, “NSA’s working on tracking down the e-mail’s exact place of origin within the District, and the FBI and CIA are digging into possible missing nuclear triggers around the world. State Department and Homeland Security have raised the national threat advisory level to red at all U.S. points of entry for the next forty-eight hours. Everyone coming into the entire country is going to be searched.”
    Marc pointed to the e-mail’s text. “Any idea where this garden of paradise is?”
    “Or what it is,” Tara amended. “I doubt al Sayika’s raising marigolds.”
    Everyone made noises of agreement. Tara was new to special ops, but as a former cop she had good instincts.
    “There is one possibility,” Commander Quinn said. “The Coast Guard got a tip about a yacht moored out in the Chesapeake Bay, called Allah’s Paradise . It’s been anchored there for a few days, though, so the timing isn’t exactly right.”
    “Still.” Marc’s brows beetled. “The names are too similar to ignore. Who’s following up?”
    “Coast Guard and FBI. A joint team will board the yacht tomorrow morning,” Quinn informed them.
    “That’s it? No other clues?” Darcy asked. “E-mails? Wire-taps? Kidnappings?”
    “A marked increase in chatter, nothing more specific than this,” Quinn said. “But NSA believes the threat is real. They’ve been monitoring al Sayika closely since December, when we took down the Abbas Tawhid cell in Louisiana.”
    Alex’s body instinctively recoiled at the hated name. Tawhid had been one of the two terrorist leaders personally responsible for his own suffering at Club Torture. Tawhid had been a savage brute, and his co-leader’s nickname said it all: the Sultan of Pain. Alex still had screaming nightmares about both men.
    Thank God they were now dead and buried.
    He rallied before a flashback beset him for the second time that day, and turned determinedly back to what Quinn was saying.
    “—with the FBI?”
    Which had apparently been addressed to him, because everyone at the table turned to gaze at him expectantly. Except for Kick, whose expression had frozen somewhere between horror and vast amusement.
    WTF?
    Alex cleared his throat and tried not to look like a complete idiot. “Um, what? Sorry, I was, uh—”
    Everyone at the table carried his own share of personal demons, and Alex’s were no big secret. Well, most of them . Quinn breezed right over the momentary lapse. “I was just saying that Commander Bridger suggested we get with the FBI and Coast Guard on this ASAP.”
    “The e-mail?” Alex clarified, momentarily puzzled as to why he’d been