Foreign Influence Read Free

why.”
    A wave of polite laughter swept the breakfast room. When it died down, he continued. “You’ve got ten minutes to load up on caffeine, aspirin, whatever it is that helps make you human, and then I want to see everyone in the lobby, checked out, with their bags ready to go. Okay?”
    Heads nodded and with the scrape of chair legs across the tile floor, the students rose to get more coffee and return to their rooms to finish packing.
    Depending on traffic, the professor knew that the drive south from Rome to Pompei would take a little over two and a half hours. Halfway there was a church with amazing mosaics that he wanted them to have plenty of time to study and sketch. After that, they had reservations for lunch at one of his favorite trattorias overlooking the Bay of Naples.
    Half an hour later, the tiny hotel lobby was awash in a sea of suitcases and backpacks. As a handful of students made one last dash to the breakfast room for coffee, others helped the program’s bus driver, Angelo, load the bags into the belly of the bright yellow motor coach. In the chaos of everyone checking out, none of them noticed that one of the bags didn’t belong to their group.
    After a final head count to make sure everyone was on board, Tony Carafano gave Angelo the okay to depart.
    As the Italian maneuvered the coach through Roman traffic, the professor distributed the day’s itinerary. Walking down the aisle, he found his students engaged in their morning ritual of texting friends back home, checking e-mail, and listening to their iPods. Few were bothering to takein their last glimpses of one of the most beautiful and historically significant cities in the world.
    With one of Rome’s most popular landmarks drawing near, Carafano called his students’ attention to it. “If anyone’s interested, we’re about to pass the Colosseum on our left.”
    Some of them looked up. Many, though, were too busy. It was a shame that even though they had all seen it before, a thing of such wondrous beauty should go ignored. Especially considering what was about to happen.
    As the bus pulled even with the ancient arena, a spotter on a rooftop half a mile away removed a cell phone from his pocket and dialed the number he had been given.
    Six seconds later, an enormous explosion rocked the city as the motor coach erupted in a billowing fireball.

CHAPTER 3
 
    F ALLUJAH , I RAQ
T HE NEXT DAY
    As his Russian GAZ sped down the dusty road, Omar-Hakim was fuming. The local Iraqi National Guard commander had been engaged in plenty of blackmail schemes, but always as the perpetrator —never the victim.
    Next to him sat the man who had ensnared him and who had broken his hand when he had gone for his gun. He never should have agreed to meet with him. In fact, he should have shot him on sight. But now it was too late. He was trapped and there was nothing he could do.
    The man in question was a forty-year-old American who spoke Arabic as well as Omar-Hakim spoke English. He was five-foot-ten with light brown hair, blue eyes, and a well-built physique. A Navy SEAL who had been recruited to the White House to help bolster the Secret Service’s counterterrorism expertise, the man had become a previous president’s favorite weapon in the war on terror. But when that president had left office, the man’s tenure had expired. Now, he was working for a private organization.
    His employer was a legend in the intelligence world and had spent the last year polishing and honing the skills of the man who, always deadlyserious about his work, now approached his life with a renewed sense of vigor.
    He had a sense that somewhere a clock was ticking down. It was due, in part, to a realization that his own time on the playing field was winding down, but there was something more to it. There was a sense of foreboding; a sense that a storm was gathering and picking up strength as it sped toward shore—his shore—America.
    There wasn’t a specific act or event he