The Project 02 - The Lance

house and out the door, past the silent cars and the Italian fountain. As he reached the street Lamont pulled up in the car.
    In the back seat, Nick held Selena close. She shivered, waves that rippled across her.
    They were blocks away when the explosion lit up the night.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

    On the way in, Nick called Stephanie and briefed her. She was waiting for them in front of Nick's building. He gave her Greenwood's computer. Maybe it had the proof the President needed. Rice had to get things under control, fast. Before anyone figured out what had really happened.
    It wasn't the first time Nick had showed up at his building looking like anything but a normal tenant. The security guard eyed Selena in her bloody robe and Nick in his black gear. He shook his head without saying a word as they made for the elevator.
    The apartment was furnished European style. Simple wood and glass and clean Scandinavian accents. Nick sat Selena down on a wide couch of brown leather and cleaned the wound on her arm. It was a brutal gash, deep and red. He put antibiotic ointment on it and bandaged the cut. It would do for now. He got up and poured her a whiskey. She was pale, still wrapped in the robe with the black sun embroidered on the breast.
    "Here, this will help." He poured one for himself. It was two in the morning. The night was quiet, cold and dark. No traffic on the street ten stories below. No garbage trucks. No Nazis.
    She drank, coughed, drank more.
    Nick sat down next to her. She clutched the glass in both hands. She had the thousand yard stare. Watching something a long way off.
    He watched her and thought about Megan. He'd wanted to keep Megan safe and had thought he could. That illusion had vanished in flame at the end of the airport runway. After Megan, he'd never wanted to feel pain like that again. Hadn't wanted to risk letting anyone in. Looking at Selena, he knew what he had done.
    "It's okay," Nick said. "It's over. You're safe."
    "What was that in the room?" she said.
    "I don't know."
    "It was evil," she said. "And the look in Greenwood's eyes. He was going to plunge that spear into my heart." She shuddered.
    Nick put his hand on her arm. "I saw you hanging there—I didn't know if you were dead. All that blood. I wanted to kill him. All of them."
    "You did," she said. "Give me another." She held out her glass. He got up and poured two more. He set his down and went into the bedroom and came back with a Turkish robe of blue cotton.
    "Put this on." She slipped into it, the sleeves too long for her arms. Nick stuffed the Nazi robe in the trash.
    She pulled the robe tight. Her color was coming back as the whiskey worked into her system. She was going to be all right, but she'd live with tonight for the rest of her life.
    He cleared his throat, said, "I've been kind of stuck the last few months."
    "What do you mean?"
    "Words come hard for me. About you. About Megan. What I'm trying to say…if you had died tonight I couldn't have handled it. I had to see that. I've pushed you away because I didn't want to admit I cared that much. But I do. I'm sorry."
    She reached up and touched him on his face. "It's as much my fault as yours. You scare me sometimes. Your dreams, all of it."
    "Selena..."
    "It's all right, Nick. It doesn't matter now."
    She was right. It didn't.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

    Morning. The team gathered at the apartment. The smell of fresh coffee drifted across the room. The TV was on. Every station carried stories about the freak gas explosion at Greenwood's home that had killed the Vice President. After a few minutes Nick turned it off.
    "Greenwood had everything on his computer," Stephanie said. She held up a disc. "It's all here. The Jerusalem bomb came out of Syria. Greenwood's son planted it at the Mosque. One of the council was Eric Reinhardt, the industrial magnate. His father wrote the diary you found on the sub. Reinhardt provided the explosives and the nuke in Tel Aviv."
    "Where did he get it?" Lamont said.
    "On the East European black market, one of those warheads that went missing after the Soviet Union collapsed."
    "What else was on the computer?" Nick asked.
    "They were plotting a coup. Rice was going to be assassinated. There was going to be an 'incident' in the Gulf of Hormuz, a casus belli pointing at the Iranians. Like the Tonkin Gulf in '64."
    A North Vietnamese gunboat raid in the Tonkin Gulf provided the excuse President Lyndon Johnson needed to escalate the war in Vietnam. Nick