by Larry Bond
“I didn’t say you screwed up.”
The emotion in her voice sounded genuine, so convincing, that it was hard for Ferguson to imagine that she could do anything wrong. But it wasn’t easy to figure out if someone was lying from the tone of their voice. Ferguson, who made a science of lying, knew you could never go by what someone said, or even how they said it; you needed the whole context of what they did, and even then it could be a tough call.
Few people were above suspicion where millions of dollars were concerned. Then why didn’t he think Guns or Rankin had taken them? He couldn’t even consider that possibility. Neither was a good liar, but that wasn’t the reason: he knew where they would draw the line. He’d seen them under fire, been next to them through a lot of mud and thunder.
He’d seen Thera under fire, too, though not for as long. Maybe he was just being harder on her, or more distant, because he realized she was in love with Monsoon.
“Just hang loose,” he told her. “Work on your tan. He also serves who sits and waits.”
“Whoever said that was blind,” snapped Thera. She killed the connection before Ferguson could tell her she was right.
~ * ~
7
NEAR JERICHO, THE WEST BANK
The building looked no different—absolutely no different—than a public school in America. In fact, as she walked through the halls Corrine couldn’t help but think of her own childhood. They paused at the door of a classroom where the students were learning English; third-graders were reading a storybook about ducklings that would have been appropriate in any American class.
Corrine realized that the officials who met her might distrust and even hate the U.S. The deputy prime minister had chided her for starting her day in Israel rather than coming directly from Baghdad or Jordan. But the children who turned from their lesson to stare at her did so with curious eyes; they were neither suspicious nor particularly troubled by her presence.
“I know that story,” she said from the doorway. “I read that when I was your age.”
She hesitated and then walked into the classroom. The children rose in respect, something that she thought would never happen in America.
“Oh, no, please sit,” she told them. She went to the teacher, a young man about her age. “Might I read that?”
The teacher, embarrassed, turned to her escorts, who besides the school principal included the deputy prime minister and the American ambassador. By the time he told Corrine that he would be honored, she had already taken the book and pulled over a chair to the children, beginning to read. When she was done, she told the children that she had gone to a school in California just like theirs.
“The paint was not as pretty, but I think the teachers worked nearly as hard as yours.” She smiled. “Do you have any questions? What would you like to know?”
For a moment, she felt as if she might be able to change things, to affect the children in some way with some simple answer about her own hometown or youth. If they knew that she was just like them, she thought, then when they grew older they might be able to see America as their friend, which it should by rights be.
But the moment wilted. The children had no questions for her, and Corrine began to feel foolish. She glanced at their teacher, then back to them. When no one said anything after a few more seconds, she asked if they got homework every night. There were a few nods, and she said something innocuous about how she used to hate homework but did it anyway.
Later, the officials took her to a refugee camp to the west of the city. The camp looked more like a tightly packed city at the foot of the mountains than a camp, but the incongruity that struck Corrine was the great beauty of the towering hills behind it. It was as if God had placed a reminder of His power and abilities in front of the citizens.
But whose God? The God of Abraham: the God of Jews, of Muslims, and Christians. They shared this land and this God but had nothing but strife to show for it.
The deputy prime minister had other appointments and took his leave. “I will pray for peace and a full agreement,” he told her as he said good-bye.
“I’ll pray with you,” said Corrine.
~ * ~
8
BAGHDAD
THE NEXT MORNING . . .
It wasn’t exactly a case of déjà vu, but when he stepped off the helicopter, Rankin remembered the last time he’d gotten off an aircraft in Baghdad, roughly two years before. Then he’d been hunting for one of Khazaal’s rivals, though he didn’t know who Khazaal was at the time. He didn’t know who anyone was in Iraqi. He thought he did; that was the problem.
When the war started, Rankin was assigned to work with a Special Operations task group searching for Saddam. When the dictator was found, Rankin was shipped out to Afghanistan for a few months. After catching two members of al Qaeda, he was “rewarded” by being assigned to lead the team hunting for the Crabman back in Iraq.
The Crabman’s real name was Fathah Tal Saed, but everybody used the dumb nickname. It came originally from the way the hajji slime had looked in one of his pictures. The picture turned out not to look much like him at all, but that was beside the point.
The Crabman had tried to collect on a reward offered by Osama bin Laden for the assassination of Paul Bremmer, the American ambassador and civilian head of the occupying government before power was turned over to the Iraqis. A lot of people actually were gunning for Bremmer, but the Crabman and his band of murderers had come a little too close for comfort.
It took two weeks to find the town north of Tikrit where he had fled after his latest attempt failed. It took three weeks to find out where he was in the town. It took five minutes to kill the son of a bitch. And it took a lifetime to get out of there once they did.
For the record, the after-action report claimed it took only three days and nights to “exfiltrate” once the assignment was completed. But those things never ever got the story right, even when they were written by the people who’d been there.
Especially not then.
Two years had changed the airport, turning it into a facility that might actually be considered efficient and attractive somewhere else. Once they cleared customs and the security area, they found a suite of car-rental desks; Corrigan had arranged for a car, which turned out to be a tiny Ford Fiesta. Guns took one look at the vehicle and went back inside to negotiate an upgrade. This proved surprisingly easy, and they were soon on their way into town.
Guns yawned. “Doesn’t look as bad as you said it would.”
“They built a few new things.” He flinched involuntarily as a car zoomed close to pass.
They were staying in the equivalent of a Days Inn, a new motel at the north of town. Applying a move from Ferguson’s playbook, Rankin took two double rooms on opposite ends of the second floor. For security they would stay together, but this gave them a backup to use just in case. They were walking from the car to the room when a voice Rankin hadn’t heard in a lifetime echoed against the freshly sealed macadam.
“Hey, Sergeant. Hey, Rankin! Steve?”
Rankin turned slowly, as if acknowledging the voice meant more than simply recognizing it. But when he did, and when he saw James Corning, he smiled, genuinely glad to see him.
“What the hell are you doing here, James?” Rankin asked.
“Same old, same old,” said James. He held up his scrawny hand and gave Rankin a mock high five.
“Still pissed off at the world?” asked James when he saw Rankin’s scowl.
“You still writing lies?”
“Oh, you betcha. Bigger the better. What are you here for? Do something wrong?”
“Yeah. I got to work it off.”
They looked at each other for a moment, Rankin towering over James, James practically dancing back and forth as if he were buzzed on amphetamines, though in reality he didn’t even drink coffee.
Alcohol was a different story.
“I have an interview with the new prime minister, so I can’t hang out
,” James told Rankin. “But we should have a drink.”
“Maybe.”
James thought that was funny and started to laugh. “You here for the president?”
“No,” said Rankin.
James thought that was even funnier. “What are you here for?”
“Looking for Scuds. You see any?”
James thought this was a joke—it did sound like one—and he laughed twice as hard as before. “You got a sense of humor in the last two years. I’ll give ya that. Listen, I’m in two-ten. Knock on the door. Same old, same old.” He did the goofy thing with his hand again, slapping at the air, and walked off.
“What’s he, some sort of reporter?” Guns asked as they checked out their rooms.
“Yeah. Except he’s OK. He was with me north of Tikrit when I got Crabman.”
“The whole time?”
“Whole time. He’s OK.”
Guns nodded. He had heard the story in bits and pieces, the only way Rankin told it. Even though he had worked with the guy for going on nine months, he still didn’t know everything that had happened.
“He’s not the guy who shot the woman?”
“No. That was Colgan. James shot the kid that tried to turn us in, and the two policemen who came for us.”
“Oh,” said Guns. “I didn’t know journalists could do stuff like that.”
“I told you he’s OK, right?”
“Whatever.” Guns shrugged. He didn’t have any feelings about journalists, one way or another.
Rankin finished scanning the room with the bug detector. He put his gear into one of the drawers, setting a small motion detector in the lower corner so he could tell if it had been tampered with.
“James is the guy who dove on the hand grenade that turned out to be a dud,” said Rankin. “Did the ultimate good deed and lived to tell about it.”
“Wow.”
Guns hadn’t heard that part of the story at all. He waited for Rankin to explain, but the other man simply went to the door. “Let’s go to Iraqi intelligence and get that bit of BS over with.”
~ * ~
9
LATAKIA
The analysts had tentatively identified the alias Judy Coldwell had used to travel to Europe and then the Middle East: Agnes Perpetua. She had used a Moroccan passport. But no one by that name had registered in any of the hotels in Latakia.
“What about the rest of the country?” Ferg asked Corrigan.
“Jeez, Ferg, Syria is a big place.”
“Immense,” said Ferguson. “Try Damascus.”
“Well, there I’m ahead of you, because I did already, and she’s not there. Not in any tourist hotel.”
It wouldn’t be hard to register under a different name. If the Syrians were more cooperative, and if they had infinite amounts of time, they might be able to find her. But neither was true. Ferguson needed a shortcut, but couldn’t think of one.
“Did you try Thatch?”
“Of course we tried Thatch,” said Corrigan. “We also tried her maiden name and some other different combinations. And we’ve looked at flight lists. Nada.”
“What’s she do again?”
“She’s an accountant.”
“Any hints from her clients? Where’s her husband?”
“Jeez, Ferg. Let us do our job all right? Next you’re going to ask if we started tracking her credit cards.”
“Did you?”
“Screw yourself, of course we did.”
“Keep looking for her,” said Ferguson. “Check back with me when you find her.”
“If I find her.”
“Better make it when, Corrigan.”
~ * ~
F
erguson rented a boat and took a spin out to the area where Birk generally anchored his yacht. It wasn’t there.
Back at his hotel, Ferguson was just taking a cola from the minibar when his sat phone rang.
“Ferguson,” he said, grabbing it.
“There are times, Bobby, when you sound so much like your father it sends a chill down my spine.”
“Hey, General. How are you?”
“Incredibly busy, distracted, and forgetful, unfortunately,” said Thomas Parnelles, the head of the CIA. “How are you?”
“Probably the same. Except for the forgetful part.”
“Memory and concentration run in the genes. I understand you had some difficulty the other night.”
“Our party got crashed.”
“Shame.”
Ferguson had known Parnelles all his life, and it was difficult when talking to him to separate the vast bulk of their relationship from the fact that Parnelles was the head of the CIA. The two roles—surrogate uncle, director of intelligence—were quite opposed to each other. Parnelles had no problem: he’d been segregating his life since before Ferguson was born.
“I had a call from Tel Aviv,” continued Parnelles. “I spoke with David Tischler. We hadn’t spoken in many years.”
“Good friend of yours?”
“Not particularly. He was rather junior when I knew him. Your father liked him. They worked on a project or two together and did some traveling. But I’ve always been at arm’s length with everyone at Mossad.”
Tischler had never mentioned Ferguson’s father. Good discipline, Ferguson thought; he wanted to keep everything at arm’s length.
Ferguson’s approach would have been entirely different.
“He was very impressed with Ms. Alston,” Parnelles continued. “He had something he wanted to share, but she was in transit, to Palestine, and he didn’t know where to get a hold of you.”
“So he called you?”
“As a matter of fact he did. I was surprised,” said Parnelles, in a tone that suggested the opposite. “They had a radar plot of an aircraft taking off from the Latakia airport two nights ago.”
“Funny, the Syrians said it was closed.”
“I heard that as well. The airplane went northward, toward Turkey, before it was lost on radar.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a time on that, would you?”
“Only that it was very late. You can’t have everything.”
“No, but you can ask.”
They were telling him about Vassenka, Ferguson guessed. Too bad he’d already figured it out.
“You called me the other night, Bobby. Was something wrong?”
You tell me, thought Ferguson, but he said, “I think it’s resolved itself.”
“That’s very good to hear. I have a great deal of confidence in you. And Ms. Alston. She’s the president’s representative on Special Demands.”
Yeah, thought Ferguson. She’s the designated guillotine victim if something goes wrong.
“I have to be going now, Bobby. You take care of yourself. We should have a drink when you get back. I have a new single malt I’d like to try.”
“I’ll be there.”
~ * ~
10
CIA BUILDING 24-442, VIRGINIA
THREE HOURS LATER . . .
If the airplane had gone directly to Iraq, it would have been easy to trace. The fact that it had gone to Turkey made things slightly more difficult. Thomas had already requested access to all of the radar and other aircraft intercepts over the border. He could look not only at the summaries but also at the raw data and could call on three different people to help interpret them. But all of the flights over the Iraq border had departed from Syria. It seemed pretty clear from the Israeli data, which he had by now verified with separate NATO intercepts off Cyprus, that there had been a flight out of Latakia to Turkey—Gaziantep, to be specific; not the largest airport in the country but not a dirt strip either. It had its share of regular flights, mostly to other places in Turkey but in about a dozen instances to countries around the Middle East.
Thomas’s mind drifted to Professor Ragguzi and his theory about the Turkey sightings or rather, to Professor Ragguzi’s two-word response to his query. It was unbelievably arrogant. Because he was right,
wasn’t he?
Of course he was.
Thomas went back to the list of flights. There were none into Iraq. So either Ferguson was wrong about the plane having Vassenka, or he was wrong about Vassenka going to Iraq. Either way, wrong.
Not that it would bother Ferguson, probably. Thomas knew him only from what Corrigan told him, but it seemed like nothing would bother him.
