by David Poyer
She’d been through one embassy attack, in Ashaara, and had no desire to see another. Whatever it took to stop it, that she would do.
No huge Suburbans or army escorts, either. Not this time.
She was going to investigate this her way.
* * *
CROSSING the street in black embroidered sharshaf, the traditional women’s outer garment, only her eyes showing. Veiling wasn’t law in Yemen, as it was in Saudi or Afghanistan these days, but most conservative women veiled, and it had its advantages. Such as going into the city without sirens and flashing lights and an armed escort. She was armed—the SIG was tucked into a shoulder holster, not her purse, in case the latter was snatched—but other than that, she looked like any of the dozens of veiled shadows shopping, visiting, towing a crying child to a clinic. Not all were in black; the older women wore cover-ups in bright reds and blues. Spindly, dark Yemeni men in white robes and suit jackets strolled by in couples, talking, hand in hand, each with a dagger stuck into his belt. She went down an alley, hooked back to cross her own trail. No one looked at her twice. She walked two blocks at random, making sure she hadn’t been trailed, before turning onto the street she wanted.
Like most residential lanes in the old city, this was extremely narrow. No car could make its way back here, so a medieval quiet reigned. The filigreed windows towered up and up, so close on either side someone could reach out from one side and touch the fingertips of one leaning from the other. It would have been picturesque except for the universal habit of pissing in the street, which made her hold her breath whenever the wind died.
She’d met Hiyat through the mosque. She lived in the Old Town and had invited Aisha to come by one afternoon. Yemeni women did chores and shopping in the morning, then got together in the afternoons to drink cardamom tea and eat honey pastries and talk. A tafrutas was the same as what her grandmother in Detroit had called a hen party, and the gossip was the same: whose husband was doing what, where to get the best cut of meat, whose son or daughter had gotten in trouble or was about to. The language changed when the women were alone together; got earthier, more colloquial. But she could nearly always follow it, and when they got too deep into dialect, Hiyat had interpreted. Aisha had shown them pictures of Tashaara and her mother and aunts, and of course they had to see Albert’s picture too. It had been fun, a break from investigative routine. She’d looked forward to coming again.
This time when Hiyat opened the door, though, she looked surprised. It only lasted for a second. “Aisha, my American friend. Come in, you are welcome here, peace, peace.”
“Peace to you, girlfriend. Hiyat, you look so lovely!”
It was true. Slim as Aisha could only remember being as a teenager, her long, dark hair pulled up to reveal a startlingly pale, long, graceful neck. Hiyat was only in her thirties but already had two boys nearly full grown. Four other women were sitting on the carpets in the diwan—a living room, sort of—the TV blasting music, toddlers fighting in the corner. Aisha said, “Salaam tahiyah,” and they nodded back; but they too looked taken aback. She recognized Gaida and Jalilah, who dropped their gazes to cups of tea and plates of cookies balanced in hennaed fingers. Here no one covered up; they were in colorful dresses, some quite stylish. Aisha pulled her own sharshaf off and took the low stool Hiyat showed her to.
The shyness didn’t last. Soon they were offering her perfume and dates, and asking whether America was going to make war on Muslims. For sheltered women in a backward country, they seemed well informed. They knew the hijackers were Saudi, for one thing. “Salafis,” Gaida said darkly. “They come here and make trouble. We were good believers long before they came, spreading new ideas. They’re as bad as the Jews.”
“As the Christians,” one of the other women said, one Aisha didn’t know. Hiyat introduced her.
Aisha didn’t ask any questions. She just wanted to hear what they thought. She politely declined to have her hands hennaed and, after an hour, decided it was time to move on. It would be a long walk to the mosque. She rose and gathered her skirts, said her good-byes.
Hiyat went to the door with her. Gave her a hug. “You are the only American I know. Tell the others we’re not all terrorists.”
“They know that.” Aisha hugged her back, but wasn’t sure her words were entirely true.
Her stomach cramped as soon as she was out in the street, making her sorry she hadn’t visited the toilet in Hiyat’s. She looked left and right, but didn’t see anyone who showed any interest in her.
The narrow, twisting lanes of a bread souk reminded her less of Arabia than Central Asia. Vendors’ cries filled the dusty air. Men on buzzing, smoking Suzukis bumped past, threading between pedestrians. She walked on ancient cobblestones worn level by centuries of sandals and cart wheels. Pastries and flatbreads lay gathering flies and dust, only cursorily protected by sheets of thin plastic that flapped and crackled in the wind. Cheek bulging with qat, the methamphetamine-like leaf some Yemenis chewed all day long, a vendor bent to serve a man in a red ball cap from a coconut-juice dispenser. The gloomy, mustached president scowled down from billboards, from dusty banners. Schoolboys ran past shouting, playing tag; a tortoiseshell cat with a stumpy tail stalked something under one of the barrows.
Again she circled back, eyeing the alley she’d emerged from. No one she recognized, no one following her.
She decided against another taxi and walked for nearly a mile through the fading afternoon, striding along, heavy purse bumping against her hip. Men’s gazes slid off. She kept glancing at her watch. Hardly anybody ever arrived on time, but as the teacher, she owed it to her students to be there at the dot of six.
When she went into the cool shadows of the room in back of the mosque, they were waiting. Not as many as usual, but the best students were there. All women, of course. And as always, they’d set a chilled lemon drink on the table to thank her. She adjusted her headwrap to uncover her face and unrolled the lesson plan stuffed in her purse.
* * *
AN hour later she stood outside the heavy wooden doors, feeling better. A visit to the women’s room had helped. Maybe she could even accept Albert’s decision. If his love had been that shallow, she was better off knowing now, rather than five years down the road.
Then her heart stilled.
Someone across the street had on a bright red ball cap.
She examined him in microsecond flicks, never looking in his direction. The twentyish man looked, for a moment, American. His fair skin was ruddy with sunburn, and he had the same close-cropped hair as the embassy guards. Blond hair gleamed on sinewy forearms above an oversized, aviator-style watch like the ones the marines wore on liberty. The same aviator-style sunglasses, too. But no marine would sport that ragged beard running down chin and throat, nor the gold earring. He stood with thumbs in belt loops, one leg hitched up behind as he leaned against the wall of a tailor’s shop. A cigarette smoldered in his mouth. A black sports bag with a Nike swoosh, the kind you carried a baseball bat or racquet in, sagged at his feet.
She fussed with her purse as if she hadn’t seen him, then turned and started walking. She went two blocks without looking behind her and resisted the temptation to look into windows, even the mirror in front of a jewelry shop. Turned right again. One block; another right turn.
When she passed the mosque again and glanced toward the shop, he wasn’t there.
She shook her head and turned on one heel as if she’d forgotten something. Went back up the street she’d just come down. Ice touched the back of her neck when halfway down the block she saw him coming down the same alley she’d just exited. His jeans were skintight, but the athletic bag sagged with something heavy. He didn’t look at her, but she caught the slightest hitch in his step.
Stuffing a sudden acceleration of the heart, glancing away, she kept walking, strides even, unhurried, even as one hand, hidden under abaya and heavy, all-cloaking sharshaf, unsnapped the thumb tab and loosened the automatic in its black nylon
sheath. Nine rounds of Cor-Bon +P+, and another magazine in reserve. It should be enough, although she wished suddenly she’d worn her Kevlar. No one would’ve noticed, under all the cloth.
Unless others were with him.
He turned and followed her, fifteen, twenty yards back. By now she had the click of his boots down—cowboy boots?—and stayed to the left of the street, an arm’s reach from the shopfronts, so that if he came up behind her, he’d be on her right and would have to turn all the way around to identify her and fire.
They walked that way for five blocks, due east toward the embassy. Youths passed on sputtering motorbikes, and she almost pulled the SIG. It was a common assassination tactic, a handgun to the head from a passing motorbike. But these passed harmlessly between her and Red Hat, weaving and shouting, eyes bulging yellow, drunk on qat.
She kept looking for a taxi. She could step in, tell him to move out fast, and maybe escape in a scorch of rubber before her pursuer could unzip the sports bag and pull out whatever he had in there. Or she could hail one of the blue-and-white sedans the city police drove. But just as in Harlem, when you really needed a cab, or a cop, they were somewhere else.
The street widened. Dangling lights glowed ahead. She noticed with a start that it was already dusk. The rugged mountains behind the lacy buildings, the tall minarets with strange, rounded domes she’d never seen anywhere else, glowed a pink-and-rose fire.
She came out into the spice souk and breathed easier. Not that he couldn’t overtake her here. But she guessed he’d want more privacy than was available with throngs picking over squash and tomatoes, drinking chai at open-air tables. Many were in the same black sharshaf she wore, and she suddenly saw how she’d outfox the man drifting along behind her. All she had to do was join that crowd around the tangerine barrow. Six, maybe seven women, some large as she. She’d thrust herself in among them, hunch to their height, pull the burka over her face, and drift out the other side. Leaving him to choose among six undistinguishable silhouettes in black.
She started that way, then slowed. Was that all she wanted? To escape? Her fingers brushed the weapon again. She was a law officer. No powers of arrest, not in a foreign country, but she could take him into custody. Hold him at gunpoint until the police arrived.
No. She was in a public marketplace. If she pulled a gun, he’d pull his. And some of these unsuspecting shoppers and vendors, or the kids running and shrieking underfoot, would die. If that was an automatic weapon in the bag …
She couldn’t arrest him here.
But she couldn’t just let him go, either. Yes, “officer safety.” What they’d drilled into the new agents at FLETC from their first day in basic. Don’t walk into a situation they’re going to have to carry you out of feetfirst. Seek cover. Call for backup. Avoid tunnel vision. No heroics. Just good procedure.
But one of the enemy had stepped into sight. From that, she could not walk away.
What day was it? Thursday?
She turned on her heel and crossed the square, not toward the tangerine barrow, but toward a side street. Twenty steps up it was an old marble entrance, grand in its way, but stained with smoke and time. She reached into her purse, but not for Mace or even her badge.
Instead she handed five hundred riyals, a couple of dollars, to the old man at the little glassed-in cage, almost like the peepshow booths she’d goggled at as a child in Harlem and always been sharply pulled away from by her mother.
The heat hit her first, then the smells. The steamy warmth and the rich perfumes of expensive soaps. Almond. Coconut. The minty reek of wintergreen. The hall was lined with booths. Gray-haired women in white nurse uniforms or voluminous, colorful abaya sat vending towels, soaps, pumice pads, the latest rejuvenating lotions from Paris and Switzerland. Ahead, dimly glimpsed through a wavering humidity, a lofty space echoed with screams and laughter. Sunbeams solid as opal glass slanted from skylights in a barrel vault through a pall of steam that undulated above an immense bathing tank. Each doorway framed a tableau from centuries past. Hefty odalisques reclined on benches, draped with towels and thick terry bathrobes, or breast-stroked slowly across the pool. From an alcove came the meaty slapping of fists into solid womanflesh as a masseuse plied her trade. Aisha passed nude women chatting on stone benches as sweat gleamed on thighs and shoulders. A tearoom, samovar bubbling, where matrons sampled dishes of almond cookies. A shy girl giggled in pink-cheeked splendor as teenaged friends rubbed perfumed oil into her breasts, pumiced the soles of her feet, braided her hair in an elaborate coif.
Hiyat and Gaida had told her about the hamams. For five days they were reserved for men; but on Thursdays, they were sacrosanct to women. No man would dare follow her in here. He’d be torn apart, by the bathers themselves or by any Islamic male who witnessed such a sacrilege.
She paid a crone with boils on her nose another hundred riyals for a private changing room. The door latched, she had a moment of doubt as she took her cell from her purse. Would it penetrate these ancient stones? But the signal was there and soon she was talking to a sleepy-sounding Colonel Al-Safani. The sleepiness vanished as she told him where she was and what she wanted him to do.
* * *
A few hours later she walked down into the courtyard of the security palace toward the white Suburban. Usually Doanelson opened car doors for her, but today he didn’t stir. He looked ticked off. Beside him Tim Benefiel cowered. The junior NCIS agent took her hand as soon as she got in. “Sure you’re all right?”
“Perfectly.”
“You shouldn’t have gone out. The deputy chief’s furious. He says—”
“Who is he?” the FBI agent interrupted. “They got any idea?”
He meant the man in the red hat, whom the PSO had nailed precisely where Aisha had told them to look: in the lane outside the hamam, waiting for her to emerge. The object in the Nike bag had turned out to be a Czech Skorpion submachine gun.
“His passport’s Bosnian. In the name Mujagic. He’s European, all right.”
“That could be ugly.”
“He’s ALQ. No doubt about that. The question is, what’s he doing here?”
“Going after you?”
“Not likely. Not originally, anyway. They wouldn’t send him all the way to Yemen just for that.” She rubbed her sweaty forehead. “Gamish thinks he’s an enforcer. The guy from out of town they send in to do the dirty work. But if he was a pro, the first thing I’d have felt was a bullet in the spine. More likely, he’s a recent recruit. I might have been his first assignment.”
Her voice started to waver, and she shut up and reached for a bottle of water. She’d been in danger before, in takedowns and hostage swaps. Still, her body seemed to react more violently, the older she got. Or maybe being a mother had something to do with it. She coughed and spoke on roughly, pretending more control than she felt. “The colonel’s there. The general’s taking a personal interest. We’ll have some answers soon. Might even get lucky.”
Benefiel: “A direct link to bin Laden?”
“Not a Bosnian. I can’t see them trusting anyone other than an ethnic Saudi. But he might point the way,” she told him.
Doanelson seemed displeased. No doubt his report would dwell on the risk she’d run, the safeguards violated. But the enemy stepped out into view so seldom, she’d had to take him down. If she was right, the Bosnian was just a foot soldier, one of the once-nearly-assimilated European Muslims radicalized in the crucible of Srebrenica. But it was the only way to learn more; to target those shadowy higher-ups who’d turned airliners into missiles.
She was just glad she didn’t have to be in the basement of the palace when the man who’d been assigned to kill her met the police who were supposedly, now, on the side of the Americans.
“I don’t like it,” Doanelson said. To her surprise, his hand covered hers. “That they went for you. Next time you might not be so lucky.”
Her eyebrows almost crawled off her face. Before she could say anything, their cell pho
nes rang, all three simultaneously. Doanelson got to his first. “Yeah?” He listened. “Step on it,” he told the driver, but they were already turning into the embassy gates, past the marines, the emplaced machine guns. The steel gates clanged shut behind them, and the moment they did, forklifts snorted forward, lifting concrete barriers like offerings to the gods of war.
* * *
THE helicopters arrived an hour later. She had that long to pack, but she didn’t need an hour. Everything she owned in Yemen fit in a duffel, her purse, and her notebook computer case. Benefiel helped carry her gear out to the open field that was the makeshift landing pad. No one seemed to know what had triggered it; only that they were evacuating, everyone except a marine security team, who’d stay to prevent looting. She didn’t know if it had anything to do with whatever her stalker had been persuaded to say. Or whether the NSA had simply heard the breaching operation being discussed somewhere around the world.
But word was it was imminent, and the Yemeni government had advised the Americans to leave. So she bent under the rotorwash, head clamped between the Mickey Mouse ears the flight crew pressed on them, and followed the junior agent up the steps to settle in the familiar canvas seats.
They pendulumed out of the dusking sky to match speed with a gray behemoth: USS Duluth, LPD-6, thirty miles off Aden. The sea was an ominous cobalt. Far off on the horizon stood Tarawa, the helicopter carrier that centerpieced the ready group, and the smaller, more jagged silhouette of a destroyer, a Burke- or Spruance-class, she couldn’t quite make out.
She’d worked aboard them all. That was what they’d trained her for, as a fresh greenie. Resident agent aboard a carrier. Or ashore, at a naval or marine base, chasing down felonies, running death scenes. She’d had no idea then how many of her classmates, including herself, would be thrown into the world of counterterrorism. Chasing deadly, elusive, globally connected criminals, motivated not by greed or momentary passion but by cold ideology and deep calculation. She’d had to learn to develop relationships with people of other cultures, respond to their concerns while keeping her own mission in the background. Jurisdictional understanding, religious sensitivity, political awareness—minefields for all agents, but for a Muslim doubly so, or maybe cubed. She wished she’d studied more psychology, social psychology, group dynamics. Economics, sociology, international relations, religion.
