Target two, p.1
Target Two, page 1
T A R G E T T W O
(THE SPY GAME—BOOK 2)
J A C K M A R S
Jack Mars
Jack Mars is the USA Today bestselling author of the LUKE STONE thriller series, which includes seven books. He is also the author of the new FORGING OF LUKE STONE prequel series, comprising six books; of the AGENT ZERO spy thriller series, comprising twelve books; of the TROY STARK thriller series, comprising five books; and of the SPY GAME thriller series, comprising six books.
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Copyright © 2022 by Jack Mars. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright MaxZolotukhin, used under license from Shutterstock.com.
BOOKS BY JACK MARS
THE SPY GAME
TARGET ONE (Book #1)
TARGET TWO (Book #2)
TARGET THREE (Book #3)
TARGET FOUR (Book #4)
TARGET FIVE (Book #5)
TARGET SIX (Book #6)
TROY STARK THRILLER SERIES
ROGUE FORCE (Book #1)
ROGUE COMMAND (Book #2)
ROGUE TARGET (Book #3)
ROGUE MISSION (Book #4)
ROGUE SHOT (Book #5)
LUKE STONE THRILLER SERIES
ANY MEANS NECESSARY (Book #1)
OATH OF OFFICE (Book #2)
SITUATION ROOM (Book #3)
OPPOSE ANY FOE (Book #4)
PRESIDENT ELECT (Book #5)
OUR SACRED HONOR (Book #6)
HOUSE DIVIDED (Book #7)
FORGING OF LUKE STONE PREQUEL SERIES
PRIMARY TARGET (Book #1)
PRIMARY COMMAND (Book #2)
PRIMARY THREAT (Book #3)
PRIMARY GLORY (Book #4)
PRIMARY VALOR (Book #5)
PRIMARY DUTY (Book #6)
AN AGENT ZERO SPY THRILLER SERIES
AGENT ZERO (Book #1)
TARGET ZERO (Book #2)
HUNTING ZERO (Book #3)
TRAPPING ZERO (Book #4)
FILE ZERO (Book #5)
RECALL ZERO (Book #6)
ASSASSIN ZERO (Book #7)
DECOY ZERO (Book #8)
CHASING ZERO (Book #9)
VENGEANCE ZERO (Book #10)
ZERO ZERO (Book #11)
ABSOLUTE ZERO (Book #12)
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
PROLOGUE
An isolated farmhouse somewhere near Durham, northern England
2 a.m.
Nothing in Professor Arnold Woburn’s long years of study had prepared him for this.
For forty years, he had meticulously learned Ancient Hebrew and Ancient Greek, studied the Old and New Testaments, and worked at his skills as a translator, historian, and Bible commentator. He could speak five modern languages in addition to the two dead ones, scan an archaeological site to find the most likely spots to excavate, and hold a roomful of scholars in the palm of his hand as he enumerated his latest discoveries.
But he had never, ever had to deal with a roomful of thugs intent on beating the crap out of him.
And they still hadn’t told him why they would even want to.
They had abducted him as he drove back from a late-night lecture at the University of Durham where he was a Visiting Professor of Theology, on a six-month sabbatical from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He’d been driving along a rural lane outside of town, not two miles from his house, thinking through the lecture he needed to give the next day when a van a hundred yards ahead of him slammed on the brakes and turned to block the street. A car driving behind him did the same, hemming him in.
As he sat there, dumbly trying to figure out what was going on, several men rushed from both vehicles, hauled him out of his car, and hustled him into the back of the van. Before he was fully aware of what was happening, he’d been blindfolded, handcuffed, and thrown on the floor of the van.
As the van pulled away, he’d cried out, “I’ll give you whatever you want. Take me to an ATM and I’ll withdraw—”
A punch to the stomach was the only instruction he needed to keep quiet.
The rest of the long ride was made in utter silence.
When the van finally opened and the blindfold was taken off, he found himself inside a large garage. The other car was parked in the second bay. The men who had abducted him wore no masks, which frightened him more than anything they could have said or done.
They didn’t care if he saw their faces because he’d never get to tell anyone.
Why? Why? He kept going over the question in his mind as they hustled him into the house, through a spacious and well-appointed living room, and down into a cellar. Why would these men abduct him? He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t famous beyond a small circle of academics. He didn’t have access to state secrets. Neither did his wife. What could this all be about?
He was too afraid to ask, too afraid to open his mouth.
They stood him in the middle of the concrete cellar, a single bare bulb dangling just above his head. He counted eight of them, all young or early middle age. All with hard features and pitiless eyes.
They took the cuffs off. He stood there, looking nervously about him, rubbing his chafed wrists.
Someone behind him cleared his throat.
Professor Woburn turned, thinking one of these thugs was finally going to talk to him.
Instead, he received a slap on the face.
The professor staggered back, more surprised than hurt. The slap hadn’t been all that hard, just so unexpected.
“What do you—”
Another man slapped him, harder this time. Woburn staggered again, then got slapped by a third man.
The circle closed on him.
He covered his head, and the slaps turned to punches against his stomach, back, and ribs.
All of those punches were pulled. He could tell that any of his eight abductors could have floored him with a single blow. At sixty-eight, it had been a long time since he had done any real exercise, and all of these men were in good shape.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he wailed as the blows increased in tempo but not in strength.
Even so, the pain began to overwhelm him. His knees buckled, and he ended up crouched on the floor, shoulders hunched, with his arms over his head for protection.
A sharp whistle. The blows stopped.
For a moment, Woburn didn’t move, thinking it was some sort of trick.
Then he dared to peek through his fingers.
An older man in a business suit, features sharp under a shaved head, walked across the cellar and stopped in front of him, studying him with icy blue eyes.
He gave a nod, and Woburn’s abductors began to hit him again.
Woburn cried out in pain and confusion.
After a few more seconds of abuse, the newcomer whistled again. The blows stopped.
Woburn looked up at the man in command.
“Hello professor. I will ask you questions, and you will answer them, fully and without hesitation. Do you understand?”
The accent had a Midwestern twang. Indiana, maybe further west. But refined. This was no farmer, but an educated man who hadn’t given up his roots.
Professor Woburn nodded.
“Very well. You were on the Tel Shimon excavation in 2015, weren’t you?”
“Y . . . yes,” he replied, confused. Why would a group of thugs want to know about that?
“And the excavators found a sealed clay jar containing papyri, didn’t they?”
“Yes, but why—”
Blows rained down on him. Woburn curled up again. The man whistled, and the blows stopped.
“I ask the questions, Professor Woburn, not you. You were the epigrapher for the excavation, and you made the initial translation of the papyri, which were written in Ancient H ebrew.”
Realization began to dawn.
“That’s correct,” Woburn said reluctantly.
“What did they say?”
Woburn almost asked why in the world someone would kidnap and beat him in order to discover what he had read on ancient papyri almost ten years ago.
But the question caught in his throat as fear clenched down around it.
Not fear of getting another beating for speaking out of turn, but because he realized what these people were after.
The man in charge slapped him again. “What did they say?”
“Y . . . you want to know about the Ark.”
“Obviously. Answer.”
“But these are legends. You have to understand that in the time of King Solomon—”
Another slap. “I’m not interested in your interpretation. Tell me what they said.”
“The papyri said the Ark of the Covenant was buried under the Temple of Solomon.”
This would have been laughable if these people weren’t so in earnest. Two-thousand-year-old bits of Israelite political propaganda and they thought they were real?
This is what Colonel Haddad had been talking about when he confiscated the papyri and forbade him from publishing.
“I’m sorry your work will come to nothing, professor, but if this gets out, every eccentric and treasure hunter in the world will try to dig under the Temple Mount. It’s an explosive enough site as it is. We can’t have that.”
Woburn had understood. The mound in the center of Old Jerusalem was the site of King Solomon’s temple, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC. It was rebuilt a few decades later as the Second Temple, and it stood until it was destroyed again by the Roman general, and future emperor, Titus in 70 AD. Only the Western Wall of the Second Temple remained visible. Often called the Wailing Wall, it was the most sacred spot for Jews, who came from all over the world to pray there.
Right on top of the hill above the Western Wall stood the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites in Islam, where Mohammed took a winged steed up to Heaven. The only holier pilgrimage centers were Medina and Mecca. The Jews and Muslims had been fighting over the Temple Mount for centuries, and with the establishment of Israel, that fight had only gotten worse. Barely a year went by without some serious bloodshed on the site.
To have treasure hunters digging there would be like throwing a flare into an oil well.
“Did they specify where?” the man in the business suit asked.
Professor Woburn could never forget when he first translated that revelatory line. It was burned in his memory forever.
“They were vague. The exact line was, ‘The Pharisees went beneath the Temple of Solomon, into the Tunnels of the Holy, and secreted the sacred Ark there to keep it safe from the enemies of the Lord.’”
“Did they mention anything else about the tunnels?”
“No. The papyri were written during the Bar Kokhba rebellion in the 130s AD. The style of writing and language, and the pot they were found in, point to that same century. Mostly the writing was about the rebellion itself, as well as some day-to-day affairs of worship. It was all published.”
“I know, professor. I read your publication. But the key text, the one you just quoted, was never published. Why not?”
Woburn wanted to ask how this man even knew about it. So few did. But it wasn’t his place to ask questions. He had learned that now.
“The Israeli government confiscated it and said that if I published, people would try to dig into the Temple Mount. Even if we point out that it’s just propaganda from a later century, people will still think it’s real and hunt for it. And you can’t even try!” he blurted, forgetting his place. “Think of the political chaos that would cause. And the security there is ironclad. There are soldiers and cameras everywhere. If you try, you’ll get arrested or, worse, shot. You might even get lynched!”
Woburn stopped himself, realizing he had spoken out of turn. And yet, he hadn’t been struck. The businessman smiled at him.
“Arrested? Lynched? I don’t think so, professor. Oh, the Temple Mount is well guarded, yes, but we’ve been planning this for a long time. We thought this might be the place, and we only needed you to confirm it.”
But how did they even know about it? He was the only one who had even read the thing, except for Moshe, the graduate student at Hebrew University who was his assistant on the dig, and he had died in a car wreck last year.
Oh, wait. He hadn’t died in a crash at all, had he?
Woburn’s throat constricted. He tried to speak, but his words only came out as a croak. He cleared his throat and tried again.
“Wait. Please, I—”
There was a flash of movement coming down in front of his face. Something constricted around his throat. He scratched at it and felt a thin metal wire. His eyes bugged as the wire cut through flesh. A knee in the small of his back made him arch his spine. He pulled on the wire, cutting his own fingers in a desperate attempt to push it away and get another lungful of precious air.
The businessman still stood in front of him, showing no reaction at all.
“Thank you for your assistance, Professor Woburn. We’ve given you a great honor. Instead of merely studying history, you will now be a part of making history.”
A minute later, Professor Arnold Woburn was dead.
CHAPTER ONE
Marrakech, Morocco
Noon
That same day
Jacob Snow bided his time, waiting for the target to make the first move. He’d been sitting at a food stall in the vast plaza of Jemaa al-Fna in Marrakesh for half an hour now, watching Karim ibn Mohammed eating a steaming bowl of harira, a Moroccan soup made with tomato and chickpeas. They guy was eating slowly, savoring it as much as he savored torturing captives on the Dark Web.
Dubbed the “Master of Pain” in various online forums, Karim ibn Mohammed was a Dark Web celebrity. He’d killed numerous so-called “enemies of Islam,” including a cop in some hick Moroccan town down south who had the audacity to arrest one of Karim’s operatives.
That video had lasted fifteen minutes. The Moroccan cop, an old guy who looked like he had spent most of his career issuing parking tickets, lived until the very last second.
Jacob had forced himself to watch. Unlike what a lot of people thought, CIA operatives don’t get desensitized to sights like that. Well, Jacob had to admit that they do get desensitized a little. It was the only way for the mind to survive the onslaught, but the spirit didn’t get desensitized. Every time he saw one of Karim’s videos, his faith in humanity died a little more.
And after watching all those videos, he was now watching the star of the show, eating his soup without a care in the world.
Jacob would make him care soon enough. By the end of the afternoon, the Master of Pain would be in a very dank, dark jail cell. Or he’d be dead.
Jacob knew which fate he’d prefer for the barbarian.
The Jemaa al-Fna was the perfect place to hide in plain sight, and the perfect place to stalk a terrorist. The huge square, bounded by old buildings and the city’s main mosque, throbbed with activity.
The center was taken up by dozens of food stalls serving everything imaginable. Grills sent up waves of heat into the air already seared by the African sun and gave off rich smells of lamb, chicken, and goat. Vast, steaming pots full of soup added to the smells and heat. Blenders whirred to pulp fruit for juice, and knives rat-tat-tatted against cutting boards, sounding like machine guns as chefs hurriedly diced vegetables for the next hundred tajines.
Surrounding this food market were open, but not empty, areas. Here traditional storytellers stood on chairs, recounting ancient tales to captivated audiences of robed and hooded Moroccans. A puppet show nearby entertained a gaggle of open-mouthed children, and beyond that, a gaggle of tourists, equally openmouthed, watched a grizzled old snake charmer do tricks with an Indian rat snake, a perfectly harmless species whose main defense mechanism is to look like a cobra.
Jacob got bitten by a real cobra once when on assignment in Pakistan. He didn’t blame the old coot for playing with a fake one. Jacob still had the scar on his ankle where the beast had bitten through his army boot, and he still had the memory of the fever, double vision, and excruciating pain he had endured in the hours afterward.
