Page 156 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest

“Enlighten me.”

“How about you and I play a game of Russian roulette with that flamethrower? You go first.”

“Ha! That’s more like it. Brave words, like an action hero.”

Suárez turned toward the camera.

“This pig murdered my wife by fire. Today, I am getting justice for my Nadia, and for me. Say goodbye, Juan Cabrillo.”

“Suárez,” Linda called out over the tinny phone speaker. “I have something you need to see.”

Suárez scowled. “No time for games.”

“No games. I have a video of Nadia.”

“Nadia? Impossible.”

“We found it in an old CIA file. Watch it before you do anything you might regret.”

The swarthy Colombian frowned with confusion. He turned toward Cabrillo, his finger on the trigger, ready to pull it. But curiosity got the better of him and he lowered the weapon and marched over to the phone.

Linda’s face was in a tiny picture-in-picture window on the screen. Suddenly her face was replaced by a grainy black-and-white thumbnail captured from old surveillance footage of a young and beautiful teenage Nadia when she was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris. The burn-in across the top left read in tiny block letters:123 Rue Saint-Jacques|30 April 1983|16:59.

Suárez nearly gasped at the haunting image, but choked down his emotions.

“Worthless. It’s just an old photo.” He turned to unleash a fiery hell onto Cabrillo.

“You’re wrong. It’s…a video. A classified video I’m sure you’ve never seen.”

Suárez’s eyes rounded like dinner plates as he let the flamethrower lance fall to his side. He snatched the phone off of its perch and pulled it close to his face.

“Activate the thumbnail to play it,” Linda said.

Suárez didn’t wait for her direction. He instantly clicked on the thumbnail and opened up the video. The undercover surveillance video Eric had managed to find and steal from the CIA archives played like an old home movie. It was obviously shot from a parked vehicle across the street from Nadia. She was sitting at a narrow iron café table in front of stone-fronted café flanked with worn shutters. A strikingAfrican woman about the same age sat across from her. They were both laughing as they chatted and smoked oily Gauloises cigarettes, with plates of croissants and demis of beer parked between them. A whining Vespa scooter throttled past them as a distant church bell rang in the background, but Suárez couldn’t hear what Nadia was saying.

The brutal Colombian mashed the volume button as he pulled the phone closer to his face, his nose practically touching the screen. His eyes blurred with tears at seeing his wife so young and beautiful. He wiped his eyes with one hand.

“Make it bigger.”

“We can’t. The file is too small. But keep watching. There’s something you really need to see. It’s coming right up.”

?

Aboard theOregon

Hali Kasim sat at his comms station, with Linda hovering over his shoulder. Max was in the Kirk Chair, with Eric at helm, and Murph on weapons. Hanley had ordered everyone else to clear the op center.

Suárez’s tear-streaked face loomed large and fish-eyed on the live video feed playing on the wall monitor.

Hali’s fingers hovered over the engage button.

Linda squeezed his shoulder. “Now.”

?

Isla de San Alejo

Suárez was so focused on the video he didn’t register the high-pitched whine milliseconds before the blinding white-hot flash detonated the phone battery. Razor-sharp fragments of glass and molten battery shrapnel shredded his eyes. He tumbled backward into the dirt, clutching at his ruined faced, blood streaming through his fingers.