Damascus Countdown Read Online Free PDF Page B

needed a target. They needed a mission. But Langley wasn’t giving them one, and he was out of ideas.
    He was tempted to call Jack Zalinsky at Langley, but what was the point? Zalinsky was eight and a half hours behind him in Washington, D.C., which meant that while it was 8:40 in the morning here in Iran, it was only ten minutes past midnight at CIA headquarters. The only reason to call Jack at this hour would be to provide critical information, not to ask for any, and that knowledge set David on edge all the more.
    The last seventy-two hours had been wrenching on so many levels. The images he kept seeing of the war around him were hellish, and he seemed to have no ability to affect it. If that weren’t enough, just when he should have his attention laser-focused on the grave task before him, he’d had the wind knocked out of him with the news that halfway around the world his mother was now gone, having lost her battle with stomach cancer. Stuck inside war-ravaged Iran, he had missed the memorial service and the burial. His phone message and brief conversation with his father seemed pitifully small in light of his father’s loss.
    And then there was the completely surprising reappearance of Marseille Harper, the first and only girl he had ever truly loved. Seeing her again after all these years came with the terrible news that her father had recently committed suicide. David could not imagine Mr. Harper taking his life; it did not seem at all like the man he’d deeply respected since childhood.
    David grieved for Marseille. An only child whose mother had been killed in the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, she was now all alone in the world. That, he figured, was likely the reason she had reached out to him out of the blue after years of silence. But after a wonderful, if slightly awkward, reunion at a restaurant in Syracuse, he’d been urgently called back to Washington. Then he’d been sent to Iran. He was legally prevented from telling Marseille he worked for the CIA, of course, so he had told her his boss was sending him to Europe on an emergency business trip. He’d felt terrible lying to her, but he hadn’t any other choice. He’d called her briefly from Germany, but had he called her from the road since then to comfort or encourage her, like any decent friend would do? No. Had he e-mailed or written her? No. How could he? He wasn’t authorized to make personal calls or send e-mails to family and friends, and all his calls and e-mails were monitored, recorded, and scrutinized by the Agency’s top officials and analysts. Did he really want Zalinsky or any of the senior management at Langley and the NSA scrutinizing his most personal communications? Hardly, and it wouldn’t just be them. Eva Fischer would be in the loop as well, complicating things all the more.
    Angry and confused and no longer able to stand the thought of pacing the halls of the tiny flat or staring at a laptop computer screen only to read more depressing news, David decided to get out and get some morning air. He changed into a T-shirt, sweatshirt, and shorts, then grabbed his phone and a Glock 9mm and let his team know he was going for a run. As he stepped outside, he could see dark clouds forming over the city and heard the rumble of thunder in the distance. The temperature hovered in the low fifties, and a strong wind was coming in off the Caspian Sea. David stretched his legs and scanned the area for trouble, for signs of anything amiss, but detected nothing.
    He looked down the street to the right and the left, both sides lined with dilapidated high-rise tenement buildings with laundry hanging from each balcony and a forest of satellite dishes stretching as far as the eye could see. The street itself, dotted with potholes, was littered with trash, empty plastic water bottles, and blue and green and pink plastic grocery bags. Everywhere he looked, trash was piled high andhad not yet been picked up by a municipality that had