The man certainly took some risks getting involved with that side of things, but Virgil figured that might make him a valuable source of information on weapons shipments and who in the country was aiding militant groups, as well as a possible source for ideas on who might have kidnapped the reporter. The question was, would Kanaan even remember him, and how would he get in touch? He looked at the cell phone number on the card and realized it was at least seven years old. People changed cell phones all the time.
Of course, helping rescue U.S. reporters kidnapped by Al-Qaeda wasn’t exactly in Virgil’s job description, but then again, he didn’t really have a job description. Since Virgil was frustrated with his lack of access to documents related to Al-Qaeda in the United States, perhaps he could go through the back door and probe into the group through its presence in Iraq. Without pausing for further thought, he called the number on the card. He immediately regretted dialing the phone, realizing it would be about 3 a.m. in Iraq, but the loud beeps of a foreign phone ringing were already pulsing in his ear, so it was too late now.
“Ebn el metanaka!” a voice swore in Arabic. Virgil recoiled at the noise. From his rusty knowledge of Arabic, he knew what the words meant. “Son of a bitch!” He hung up the phone gently, hoping it was a wrong number. If it were Kanaan, he might not be too happy once he found out the caller was Virgil. But no, that wasn’t how Kanaan would react. Kanaan was used to late-night phone calls. Probably a wrong number.
He Googled Kanaan and found what appeared to be the man’s number at the company he ran. It was worth a try, anyway, but just in case, he’d wait until daytime in Iraq.
He got in touch with Kanaan the next morning.
“Virge!” the voice at the other end of the phone exclaimed. “A salamu a laykum! What’s happening, man?” Virgil smiled, remembering how Kanaan, from the time he’d spent in the United States, had picked up some U.S. slang to mix into his accented English. The phrase, “What’s happening, man?” coming from Kanaan sounded slightly amusing.
“Well, Aban, I got shipped off to the retirement home for a few years, but now I’m back,” Virgil said, putting his shoeless feet up on the little desk in his office. “I’m wondering if you can put me in touch with anyone there who might have some sense of who kidnapped that New York Times journalist last week – Nancy Hanson. It’s kind of a personal thing, not official you know. She’s an old acquaintance of mine.”
“Oh yes,” Kanaan said. “I know all about that – it’s all over the news here. But I don’t deal with people like that – Al-Qaeda. You learn to keep away from those guys if you’re here – they’ll kill you quick. I got out of that weapons stuff a long time ago. They would have beheaded me, and I think my neck looks better with something on top of it.” He laughed. “I still have a bodyguard, you know. I’m too well known.”
“Why don’t you leave the country?” Virgil asked. “I’m sure we could keep you safe here. You helped us a lot back in the day.”
“Yeah, but that would be the easy way, bro!” Kanaan said with another laugh. “I don’t do things the easy way, you know. I’ve got a business here. I couldn’t just leave all my people behind. Besides, there’s money to be made. Look, I’ll see what I can do to help you with this reporter thing. I know some people who know some people. Maybe they can track her down. You guys going to pay their ransom? They want a couple hundred prisoners freed, right?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Virgil said, running his hands through his hair. Seemed like he could feel more of his bare scalp every day. “Just see what you can do. I appreciate it.”
“No problem, man,” Kanaan said. “If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”
Virgil hung up, again trying to swallow his feeling of irrelevance. He told himself not to think about Nancy. She’d been the one to accept the assignment over there, and she’d known the risks. But it was one thing to read about terrorist kidnappings; it was another to know the victim. He wondered if he was somehow responsible for it, indirectly. Perhaps if she hadn’t gotten so much acclaim from that scoop he’d given her, she wouldn’t have been promoted to go over there in the first place.
“Dammit,” he said, and brought his feet down from the desk.
CHAPTER 11
Chicago Break-In
Bang! A crashing sound woke him. Bang! There it was again. Someone pounding on Adam’s door. It was easy to hear because his apartment only had one room, and he slept just feet from the front entrance. His cat Elmer ran under the bed to hide.
“Open up, buddy!” someone called from the hallway. “Wake up, little sleepyhead,” came a sing-song voice.
Adam’s heart pounded in his chest. He glanced at the bedside clock. It read 2:17 a.m. He wondered if he should just pretend not to be here. Maybe if he was quiet long enough, whoever it was would go away.
“All right, buddy. I know you’re there,” came the voice. “I’m waiting for you to come out, even if I have to wait till morning.”
Adam reached for the phone to dial 911. Just then, the door came flying open and a heavyset black man, about 6 feet 4 and wearing a black ski mask that revealed just his eyes and mouth, stormed into the apartment and tore the phone out of Adam’s hands before he could dial. A thick, hairy arm covered his mouth, stifling his scream, and he was dragged into the corner. The man used a booted foot to slam the front door even as he pinned Adam down against the floor and kept an arm over his mouth. Adam moved his head around trying to get away, but the man’s grip simply tightened on him. The faint light from a streetlight outside the window glistened in the man’s glaring eyes.
“Buddy, you listen to me and listen close,” the man said, more quietly but firmly. “We know what you’re up to. We’ve seen your website. We’ve seen you out at the airport. We have a pretty big deal going down, and you and your numb nuts buddy can’t stop it. So do you know what we’re going to do?”
Adam shook his head as well as he could with the man’s arms wrapped around it.
“Well, we’re going to make a little deal,” the man said. “I’m going to give you a small amount of funding, and you’re going to take it and agree to never tell anyone what you saw, and to never put anything on the Internet about it. You’re also going to give me your user name and password for the blog. Break our little deal, and we’ll break you, my man. We’ll break you and your pal. Now does that make sense?”
“Yeth,” Adam struggled to say, his mouth still buried in the skin of the man’s arm.
“Good,” said the man, still holding Adam tight. He thrust a pen and a notepad at Adam and watched carefully as Adam wrote down the blog information and handed it back. “Very good. This had better work, buddy.”
“It will,” Adam said, regretfully. He didn’t have the courage to give fake information.
The man stuffed the pad into one of the pockets of his blue down jacket and turned to leave. Then he turned around to face Adam again.
“Oh yeah,” the man said. “I have a small envelope for you that I’m going to leave on your bed before I go. Any phone calls to the police, and you’re going to hear from me again. But trust me, fatso, you don’t want that to happen.”
“OK, OK – just let me go,” Adam stammered, finally getting his mouth away from the arm and into some fresh air. The man smelled of cigarettes and BO.
The man loosened his grip and patted Adam gently on the head. “Very good, very good, my man,” he said. “I’ll be leaving now. And let’s not see each other again, OK?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Adam said, struggling to get his breath as he lay sprawled on the floor. The man got up, drew an envelope from the pocket of his dark jacket and tossed it on Adam’s bed.
“Nice place you got here, buddy,” he said, looking around at the dark, messy little room. “You sleep tight now. No hard feelings, OK?” Adam shook his head to show that yeah, everything was just hunky dory. He even managed a weak little smile. The man playfully wagged his fingers goodbye and stepped out the door, closing it qu
ietly behind him.
When Adam finally stopped hyperventilating, he raised himself off the floor and stumbled over to his bed. He flipped on the bedside lamp and opened the envelope. Hundred-dollar bills tumbled out onto the blanket.
CHAPTER 12
A Potential Opening
Virgil sat at his desk, still simmering with resentment about not getting access to the material he needed. Suddenly, he heard the distinctive thump outside of Harry’s polished brown cowboy boots, and the door swung open. Harry wasn’t much for knocking on doors. He just walked in as if he’d been invited. This bothered Virgil, but he was getting used to it. Harry held a file in one hand and waved it at Virgil, a smile lighting up his leathery face.
“Virge,” Harry drawled, walking up to Virgil’s desk and dropping the file on it. “I got this from a buddy over at the FAA the other day. I guess they don’t have a lot goin’ on over there, so they spend some time surfin’ the web, and they came across something I thought you might find interesting. Or maybe you won’t, but I’ll let you decide.” Virgil looked down at the file.
“Go ahead,” Harry said, “open it up.”
Virgil opened the file. There was just one page inside – a copy of an Internet page, it seemed. And not too professional either, from the look of it. Probably someone’s homemade web site. He read the paper while Harry watched, a half smile on his red face.
“Funny Business at O’Hare?” was the title.
“Earlier this week, I observed several grounds crew members at O’Hare acting suspiciously. Are these men doing their jobs, or are they attempting to help criminals load drugs or other materials onto airliners? As I’ve written in the past, the airline security here in the U.S. is a joke. It’s far too easy for a rogue grounds crew member to put dangerous materials onto planes, and we may be seeing just that in these photos.”
There was a photo under the article, but it was hard to make anything out. It appeared to be of a grounds crew loading a package onto a plane. The photo itself didn’t look too extraordinary to Virgil, but the implications were obvious.
Virgil looked up at Harry. “Does the FBI know about this?” he asked.
“Oh yeah, they’re aware,” Harry said. “I happen to know they’re on it. But I wanted you to see it because…”
“Because of the terrorism implications,” Virgil interrupted.
“Yeah, exactly,” Harry replied.
“We’ve always known airport security is a weakness,” Virgil said. “I’ve never felt the measures taken since 2001 did much to protect anyone. Far too many ways to get around them.”
“Yeah, and it looks like these folks were tryin’ to do just that,” Harry said.
“Any sense if they were successful?”
“Well, not yet, anyway. The plane you see in the photo there took off and landed with no incidents. The FBI thinks these fellas might have been doing a test run, you see.”
Virgil nodded, tapping his fingers on his desk at the same time. “Right,” he said. “They probably made contacts with some disgruntled airport ground workers, paid them to load items onto some planes and checked to see if they could get away with it. Probably started with some non-lethal items, and maybe now they’ll work their way up to something bigger.”
“Now we’re not sure it’s lethal stuff these folks have in mind,” Harry said, scratching behind one of his big ears. “This may be a drug thing. We’ve seen that before.”
“True, true,” Virgil said. “But my job is to look into any terrorism implications. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that these guys are planning to hijack a plane. How do you do that nowadays, with the post-2001 measures we’ve taken? You can’t get on a plane with a box cutter any more. And it’s probably going to be tough for a whole group of terrorists to board a plane, with the better background checks we have now. So what do you do? You streamline your operation and raise your weapon profile. Maybe just one or two terrorists, but this time with guns instead of box cutters. You get the disgruntled airport workers to get the guns onboard for you, because they don’t have to go through a metal detector. It’s a huge hole in the security apparatus.”
“Yeah, but how do they get into the sealed cockpit?” Harry asked.
“Oh, that’s pretty simple, I suppose,” Virgil said. “Put a gun to a flight attendant’s head and force her to open the cockpit door. Or wait till she’s delivering breakfast to the pilots and force their way in then.”
Harry nodded. “Yep, that sounds right to me,” he said.
“Now of course this is all just theory on my part,” Virgil said. “I have no sense of whether there’s a plot afoot. It’s like I told you last week – I don’t have access to a lot of the stuff I need to track down those guys who may have gotten away in ‘01. Have you gotten to my memo yet?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry, Virge. This job, it’s a bitch. The Iraq thing – it just takes all my time. I promise I’ll get to the memo as soon as I can and get you what you need.”
“OK,” Virgil said. “And I promise not to jump to conclusions based on this. By the way, has the FBI been able to track down the perpetrators?” He stood up and began pacing around the room.
“Not yet,” Harry replied. “But I reckon they have a decent idea. Maybe they’re closin’ in.”
“What about the guy who runs the blog?” Virgil asked. “Any info on him?”
“I’ll leave that to you and the FBI, Virge,” Harry said, cracking a smile. “I’m no good at snoopin’ the way you and your friends are over there.”
“Mr. Secretary?” a voice came in from the hallway. Harry turned. His assistant was standing in the door.
“Well, now, looks like I spent too long chatting with my buddy Virge and got running late,” Harry said. “How late am I, Vic?”
“Not too bad sir,” the assistant said, glancing at his wristwatch. “About five minutes.”
“Ah, that’s the nice thing about being on top,” Harry said to Virgil with a smile. “They all have to wait for me. OK, I’m comin’. Let me know where you get with that, Virge.”
“No problem,” Virgil said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
“Say, Virge,” Harry said. “Did I ever tell you about the memo Rummy sent to me and a few other guys a couple years ago?”
“I don’t think so, Harry, why?”
“The subject line was, ‘Issues with various countries,’ and the memo went somethin’ like, ‘We need to solve the Pakistan problem, and Korea doesn’t seem to be going well. Are you coming up with some proposals for me to send around?’”
Virgil’s laughter followed Harry out of the room.
Once Harry left, just for the hell of it, Virgil typed in the URL of the airplane web site to see if there was anything further. But when he tried to get on, he got a message that the site was down. He tried refreshing it a couple of times, but no luck. “Dammit,” he muttered to himself. He just had to learn to get better at this Internet stuff. Being 54 in 2006 was no picnic. His sons were both in tech-related jobs, and they could run circles around him on the computer. Maybe, Virgil thought, he should have one of them be an assistant. Of course he’d probably drive them nuts with his grumpiness. “Dad, you’ve always been a glass half-empty kind of guy, haven’t you?” his younger son Keith had told him last weekend when they met for coffee and Virgil had complained about his lack of access to documents. He didn’t like hearing that from his son, but he had to admit there was a lot of truth there. Kids these days seemed to be OK saying anything they wanted to their parents. He couldn’t imagine telling his own dad something like that back when he was 24.
Harry sighed and Googled Adam’s name, but didn’t come up with much. It was pretty difficult to find out anything about anyone on the Internet, Virgil reflected. He guessed that the FBI was probably working to track the guy down and put it out of his mind for now.
Later that day, Virgil’s phone rang. It was his buddy Kanaan in Baghdad.
“Hey, my man,” Kanaan said. �
��How’s the weather over there?”
“Pretty good,” Virgil said. “A lot better here in the winter than the summer, the way I see it.”
“Oh yeah, same here,” Kanaan replied, laughing. “You know the scene over here – 120 degrees all summer. Sidewalks practically melting. Probably the sun drives everyone crazy. Maybe you move everyone in Baghdad to Washington, and no more wars. Ha ha.”
“Yeah, right,” Virgil said, impatient with the man’s jokes. “So, did you find out anything?”
“Look, Virge, about your friend the reporter, you never heard nothing from me,” Kanaan said. “I don’t want to get my head cut off, you know. But I do have some buddies over here, and they think they know a bit about those guys that took her. Do you have a pen?”
“Yeah, I’m getting it now,” Virgil said, fumbling for a pen in his can of writing utensils. The first one was broken and he threw it across the room. The second one worked.
“OK,” Kanaan said. “They’re almost certainly Al-Qaeda. No one’s claimed credit for the bombing at the school, but it’s just like all the others they’ve done. You know – killing the Shiites, suicide bomber, all that.”
“Right,” Virgil said, nodding.
“What my guys can’t figure out is why this lady got kidnapped,” Kanaan said. “Usually there’s just one car and it blows up and that’s it. But it sounds like this time there was another group of guys behind the first car, and they went in and tried to find someone to kidnap. Guess they thought it would be easier to do with all the smoke and stuff, you know, grab someone and take them away for ransom. Anyway, someone saw this truck leaving the scene with some foreign-looking guys in it. No way they’re Iraqis, no way. The truck went off to the east, but no one knows exactly where, but they know the make and model and I got one of my best guys looking into it. He’ll let me know if he finds out anything.”
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