Andrew Britton - Ryan Kealey 3 The Invisible

THE

INVISIBLE

Also by AndrewBritton:

The Assassin

The American

THE

INVISIBLE

ANDREWBRITTON

KENSINGTON BOOKS http://www.kensington books.com

For my grandmother, Eunice Britton

Acknowledgments

To Linda Cashdan of The Word Process ,for her editorial guidance early in the process. Thanks again for your input.To Erika Lease, M.D., for her invaluable contribution on the medical side ofthings. To Carol Fitzgerald and everyone at bookreporter.com, for designing andmaintaining my Web site. To Connie Asero and everyone who participated in

theCrystal Coast Book Festival. It was an extraordinary event. Thanks for lettingme be part of it.

Thanks to everyone at Kensington,especially Steven Zacharius, Robin E. Cook, Laurie Parkin, Maureen Cuddy,Michaela Hamilton, and Doug Mendini, a true fixture on the trade show circuit. To MerylEarl, who has somehow managed to get my books published in a multitude oflanguages, none of which I understand. To Rosemary Silva, for her outstandingwork with the copyediting. Also thanks to Alex Clarke and the entire team atPenguin Books for their continued support in Australia and the U.K.

To my editor, Audrey LaFehr, for herenthusiasm, encouragement, and exceptional patience. Thanks for everything.

To my agent, Nancy Coffey, for many, manythings. If I had to name them all, the acknowledgments would be longer than thebook itself. So thanks for all that you do. Let"s hope this is just the thirdof many.

And to Dezzy Murphy and the other Irishclimbers who con-quered Concordia, thanks for inspiring the prologue.

An invisible is CIA-speak for theultimate intelligence nightmare: a terrorist who is an ethnic native of thetarget country and who can cross its borders unchecked, move around the countryunques-tioned, and go completely unnoticed while setting up the founda-tion formonstrous harm.

PROLOGUE

THE ARAKORAMHIGHWAY (KKH), PAKISTAN

n Rebeka C esnik"s opinion, the view, even when seenthrough the cracked window of the ancient bus winding its way down from Kashgarto Islamabad, was simply magni ficent. Perfect. Stunning in every conceivable way.These were the words she had used to de-scribe every trip she"d ever taken, andher effusive comments always made her friends and relatives smile, though ithad taken her quite a whilethe better part of her life, in factto understandjust why that was.

Her mother had been the one to finally let her in on the joke. That hadbeen a few years earlier, shortly after Rebeka joined From-mer"s as a travelphotographer. At the time, the observation had struck her as not only true, butslightly humorous. Even now the memory made her smile, but she couldn"t disputeher mother"s words.

It"s a good thing you took upphotography instead of writing, she had said, because no matter where you go, your descriptions areal-ways the same. Every place you visit is just as perfect as the last.

It was a true enough statement, Rebekasupposed, though she"d never really dwelled on her lack of verbal creativity.All she cared about was her traveling and her art, and to her great satisfaction,she"d been able to make a successful living with both. She"d always had theability to pick out a unique, compelling scene, but that wasn"t enough for her.Nor was it enough to satisfy her extremely demand-ing employers. Instead, her goal was to pull thereaders into the pho-tograph, to draw them away from the article itself. It wasa lot to as-pire to, as the magazines she worked for employed some of the bestwriters in the business. Moreover, it was nearly impossible to capture thegrandeur of the things she saw on a regular basis. Still, judging by the awardsand accolades she had racked up over her short career including theprestigious Hasselblad Award in 2006she had man-aged to make her mark in anindustry brimming with talent, and that was no small feat.

Rebekahad embarked on her current career after winning a re-gional photographycontest at seventeen years of age. She"d started shooting on an amateur basisin 2002 with a secondhand Minolta Dynax 8000i. The camera had been a gift froma spoiled cousin who"d since moved on to more expensive hobbies, and she"dfallen in love with it instantly. Her love of travel, however, dated back toher childhood, and she sometimes wondered why it had taken her so long to workher two favorite hobbies into what had become a spec-tacular career. She hadgrown up on the Soca River in the Julian Alps, not far from the famedPredjama Castle, and she credited the gor-geous scenery of her childhood withsparking not only her interest in nature, but her desire to see as much of itas possible.

Since leaving Frommer"s the previous year,she had embarked on freelance assignments for Time, Newsweek, Le Monde,National Geographic, and Nasa zena in her nativeSlovenia, just to name a few. Those assignments had given her the opportunityto visit four-teen countries over the course of two short years, in addition tothe twelve she"d already seen, and she had thoroughly documented herjourneysnot only with her camera, but also in her journal, by far her mosttreasured possession. Every assignment carried with it the promise of a newadventure, but as she stared out the window, ig-noring the unpleasant sway ofthe bus on the steep mountain road, she couldn"t help but think that thesnowcapped peaks surrounding the Hunza Valley had surpassed her wildestexpectations.

A brief shower earlier in the day had given way to aspectacularly clear blue sky, and the afternoon sun made the snow-topped spiresin the dis-tance glisten in ways she could never hope to capture on film. It didn"t happen often, but there weretimes when she knew she could never do justice to the scenery, and while thosemoments were among the most thrilling of her personal life, they were hard toaccept profes-sionally. Still, she wouldn"t have traded the sight for anything.

Aftera while the bus rocked slightly to the right as it swept around the mountain,and the splendid sight of Tirich Mirthe high-est peak in the Hindu Kushrangefaded from view as the bus began the long descent into Khunjerab NationalPark. Disappointed with the change in scenery, Rebeka turned in her seat andlet her gaze drift over her fellow passengers. The vehicle was filled to capacity, which wasn"t surprising,given the time of year. Many were climbers destined for the world"s mostchallenging peaks, and they were as-sured of permits only during the summermonths. She had traveled with these people for weeks on end, and she"d come toknow most of them fairly well.

Sitting directly across from her was BeniAbruzzi, the rakish, hand-some, long-limbed climber from Brescia. He wastalkingwith ani-mated gestures, as alwaysto Umberto Verga, his stockySicilian cousin. Umberto rarely spoke, and when he did, it sounded more like ase-ries of grunts than actual speech, but Beni was only too happy to pick uphis cousin"s slack. He"d served as a caporal maggiore, an in-fantrycorporal, in the Italian army. He"d also spent some time in Iraq, a fact he"dmentioned more times than Rebeka cared to remember. Abruzzi had spent hoursbragging about his military exploits, and while Rebeka believed most of hisstories, she wasn"t impressed in the least.

Unsurprisingly, the Italian"s gazewas presently fixedon the trio of pretty Norwegian nurses who had joined them in Tashkurgan. Thathad been two hours earlier, and forty minutes before the bus crossed from Chinainto Pakistan via the Khunjerab Pass, the highest point on the KarakoramHighway.

There was also the downtrodden group ofDanish climbers who"d arrived at K2 four days earlier with the goal ofsummiting, only to turn back at base camp in Concordia, and a small knot ofaging Cana-dian trekkers. There was even a renowned American geologist by thename of Timothy Welch. The professor emeritus from the University of Coloradoseemed to spend a great deal of time staring at his hands and muttering underhis breath, which Cesnik found both amusing and a little unnerving.