“If nothing goes boom,” I said to them, “someone will be along to let you out. Hopefully that will be today. If you start yelling or try to escape, I will come back here and kill you. Tell me you understand.”

The major answered for all of them. A short guttural grunt. Good enough.

I closed and locked the door and barricaded it with a desk.

“Come on,” I said to Ghost, and went back out into the hall.

“Gaucho,” Lydia said quietly, “I’ve been trying to raise the rest of the team but all I’m hearing is my own voice.”

I tried my earbud. Nothing.

“Worry about it later,” I said. “We still have a nuke to find before it blows us all into orbit.”

She faked a coquettish grin. “Aww, you sure know how to sweet-talk a girl.”

The clock inside my head said tick-tock.

Chapter One Hundred Seven

Chapter One Hundred Seven

Aghajari Oil Refinery

Iran

June 16, 5:52 a.m.

But the hall wasn’t telling us anything. It was a short run to a blank wall made from gray bricks. I pulled up the floor plans for this level and studied them. The original designs called for a corridor leading ten yards straight ahead and then a big square room forty yards per side. The plans had been to use the room for bulk storage and to build a heavy-duty elevator down from the loading bay. Technically this is where Abdul’s machine parts should have been taken to be uncrated and then switched to other elevators to bring them where the parts were needed. But the chamber had been x-ed off of the blueprints in favor of a more practical ground-level storehouse that would allow parts to be rolled in from trucks by forklift. Less expensive and cumbersome than a subterranean storeroom.

Lydia pounded a fist on the wall and shook her head. “This doesn’t make sense, Gaucho. I mean … it had to be expensive as hell—and time consuming—to cut a corridor this far into the rock just to put in a few extra storerooms and a security substation. And it would have cost even more to run plumbing, electricity, computer and phone lines, and everything else all the way the down here. Who does that without a reason?”

“No one does that,” I agreed.

And yet there was no door hidden in the wall.

“Shall we go ask the major again?” she asked.

“It’s that or go out for a beer.”

Ghost wagged his tail. Booze hound. But as we approached the door, Ghost immediately started growling. The fur on his back stood up like the bristles on a wire brush, and he barked sharply at the closed bathroom door.

“Cuidado,” snapped Lydia, bringing the rifle up.