Wincing, she glanced around her. Gray read the confusion in her eyes, behind the war between pain and morphine. She quickly focused back to him.

“I…the obelisk…” she said with strained worry.

Gray was tired of hearing about the damned obelisk. “We’ll have to get it later. It broke after you crashed. I left it back at the house.”

His words seemed to cause her more pain than her bullet wound. But perhaps his earlier lapse was a bit of luck. Maybe Nasser had gone after the obelisk rather than pursuing them.

His mother, overhearing their conversation, stepped forward. “You’re talking about that broken black pillar.” She patted her large purse. “I picked it up when I went inside to get the bandages. It looked old and maybe valuable.”

Eyes closing with relief, Seichan nodded to both those assessments. Her head hung in exhaustion. “Thank God.”

“What’s so important about it?” he asked.

“It could…it might save the world. If we’re not too late already.”

Gray glanced to his mother’s tote, then back to Seichan. “What the hell do you mean?”

She waved an arm weakly, fading again. “Too complicated. I need your hel p…can’t…not alone…we must, must get away.”

Her chin dropped to her chest as she slipped into unconsciousness again. Kowalski caught her weight on his hip.

Gray was tempted to use another capsule of smelling salts, but he feared exerting her any further. Fresh blood trickled from her bandage.

His mother seemed to make the same assessment. She nodded to the trail. “We can’t be far from the hospital now.”

Gray turned to the dark path on the far side of the trestle. It was the other reason he had taken the Thunderbird north through the woods, following a suggestion from his mother. On the far side of Glover-Archibold Park spread the campus of Georgetown University. The school’s hospital bordered the edge of the forest. His mother had former students who labored there.

If they could reach it in secret…

But was the destination too obvious?

There were a thousand exits out of the park system, but Nasser knew his quarry bore a seriously injured woman and that she needed immediate medical attention.

It was a huge risk, but Gray saw no way of avoiding it.

He remembered Nasser’s eyes as the bastard asked about the obelisk. Hungry, ruthless. The Egyptian had believed Gray’s assertion that the obelisk had been left behind — mostly because Gray had believed it. But which was more important to the man: obtaining the obelisk or seeking revenge?

He stared around at their small group.

All their lives balanced on that answer.

A half hour later Painter stalked the length of his office, a hands-free headset fixed to his ear. “They’re all dead?”

Behind him, the plasma screen displayed live feed of the fiery blaze of three homes, along with a section of the neighboring parkland. It had been a dry summer, turning forest into kindling. Fire engines and emergency personnel swarmed the cordoned-off area. Television vans were already raising satellite antennas. A police helicopter circled above, floodlight spearing down, searching.

But it was too little, too late.

Neither the convertible Gray had driven to the safe house nor the hijacked medical van was among the wreckage. The raging fires hampered further investigation.

The only solid news was bad. The original med-van team had been discovered in an abandoned field, each shot in the head. He had four folders on his desk. He sank to his seat. On top of everything else, he had four hard calls to make before dawn. To their families.

Painter’s aide, Brant, wheeled into his doorway. “Sorry, sir.”

Painter nodded to him.

“I have Dr. McKnight holding on your third line. He’s available for phone or video conferencing.”

Painter pointed a thumb at the fiery screen. “I’ve seen enough of this for the moment. Patch Sean through.”

Painter peeled the headset out of his ear. He swore he might as well have one surgically implanted. He swung around to face the screen as the emergency scene dissolved away, replaced by the face of his boss.

Sean McKnight had founded Sigma but had since been promoted to the head of DARPA. Painter had placed a call to him as soon as Seichan had crashed into Gray’s life. Both for his advice and expertise. But also for one more pressing reason.

“So the Guild is back on our doorstep,” Sean said. He combed his fingers through his graying red hair. It was mussed, and it looked like he had been summoned directly from his bed. But his white shirt was creased and pressed. A navy pinstripe jacket lay over an arm of his chair. Ready for a long day.

“The Guild may be more than on our doorstep,” Painter said. “Current intel suggests they may be through the door already.” Painter tapped a folder behind him. “You’ve already read the sit-op.”

A nod answered him. “Plainly the Guild knew about the safe house. Knew Gray was headed there with their AWOL operative. We have a leak somewhere.”

“I’m afraid we have to assume that.”

He shook his head. If true, it was disastrous. The Guild had infiltrated Sigma once before, but Painter would swear his organization was clean now. After the last mole had been exposed, Painter had burned Sigma to its roots and rebuilt it from the ground up, with hundreds of safeguards and countermeasures.

All for nothing.

If there was still a leak, the very foundation of Sigma might be suspect. It could mean the dissolution of the organization. An internal audit was already under way, a cost-benefit analysis of Sigma’s basic command structure, under the guise of unifying U.S. intelligence-gathering services within Homeland Security.

But worst of all, there was a more intimate cost.

Painter had the four folders waiting on his desk to remind him.

Sean continued. “It is not just our division that is plagued by this terrorist-for-hire network. Two months ago, MI6 cleared a cell that had infiltrated a British Aerospace’s black-ops project outside of Glasgow. They lost five agents in the process. The Guild is everywhere and nowhere. Here at home, the NSA and the CIA are still trying to figure out who the Guild’s Osama is. We know next to nothing about their leader or their main players. We don’t even know if they are called the Guild. The derivation of that name came out of a nickname by an SAS officer, now deceased. Still, apparently the various cells have taken on the name as their own, at first mockingly, then perhaps more genuinely. We know that little about the network.”

He left this last hanging.

Painter understood. “And now we have a defector.”

Sean sighed. “We’ve been trying to get a foothold in the organization for years. I’ve proposed several scenarios. But nothing as efficient as having an operative, one of the Guild elite, drop into our laps. We must secure her.”

“And the Guild will try just as hard to stop that from happening. They’ve made that plain. To eliminate her, they’ve chosen to expose their own infiltration into Sigma. A costly choice. And to carry it out, they’ve sent their best and most elusive operative. Another of their elite.”

“I saw the video of the man at the safe house. Read his dossier.” Sean grimaced.

Painter had read the same. The Butcher of Calcutta. His true origin and allegience was unknown. Of mixed descent, he had posed in the past as Indian, Pakistani, Iraqi, Egyptian, and Libyan. If Seichan had a male counterpart, it would be this man.

“We have one lead,” Painter said. “We were able to pick out his name off the video feed. Nasser. But that’s the best we could manage.”

Sean waved a dismissive hand. “His aliases are as numerous as his assassinations. He’s left a bloody trail all around the world, mostly concentrating in North Africa and throughout the Middle and Near East. Though just recently he’s extended deeper into the Mediterranean. The garroting of an archaeologist in Greece. The assassination of a museum curator in Italy.”