As dusk approached, Asha shifted away from the lamppost he was leaning against and began pacing back and forth on the city block, never letting his gaze wander far from the door of the restaurant. Occasionally he caught site of the American’s blond dinner companion. Asha took a free paper from a newsstand and moved his eyes horizontally from left to right, pretending to read it so as not to be conspicuous. Not that the people on this busy street would notice one more black foreigner as they hurried from Piccadilly Circus toward the restaurants here and the residential areas behind him.
Asha tried to determine the relationship between the two men. Was it personal or professional? He was certain that the American agent had come to England because of the death of Johnny Dunner. That meant his priority would be professional. But an agent with a clandestine service would be unlikely to discuss an investigation in an open environment such as a restaurant. The blond man had, of course, been inside the East India Club for some time before he and the American left for the restaurant. If the man was a British official, the two could have easily discussed the investigation inside the club and then gone to dinner. Did that mean they had both personal and professional relationships? Asha smiled. It didn’t matter. Both men would die tonight.
Asha came to attention when he noticed a waiter nod to the American and then carry away a leather notebook that almost certainly contained the tab. His heartbeat quickened. He tucked the newspaper under one arm, walked toward a crosswalk, and began to cross the street. His finely honed killing instincts were sharpening his senses—eyes, ears, nose—readying him for what lay ahead. His heart nearly leapt from his chest when the car horn blared out from the right. Accustomed to American traffic patterns, he hadn’t even thought to look in that direction before crossing. He calmed his thundering heart and made his way to the storefront next to the restaurant. If they returned to St. James Square and the East India Club, as he expected them to do, then they’d head in the opposite direction and he could simply follow them, lost among the many other pedestrians going that way.
As he anticipated, the two men emerged from the restaurant and immediately turned their backs to Asha, laughing and talking about some school. Spoiled Westerners with too much money, Asha thought with contempt. He slipped the switchblade from his pocket and concealed it beneath the newspaper in his left hand, then moved in closer. Now only a few steps away from them, he kept his head down, focusing on the pattern of their stride in case they changed direction and he needed to do the same. Darkness had fallen over London now. He had never failed in killing a person after dark. He tossed his newspaper aside. The evening breeze separated the pages as it fell to the ground.
“After-dinner drink?”
“Absolutely. My flight isn’t until the morning. Where do you suggest, Robert?”
“There’s a spot just up here that will do nicely.”
In front of them was a paifang, one of the Chinese archways common in the restaurant districts of most cities with a Chinese population. As Robert pointed to a second-floor jazz club, the breeze at their backs freshened. Recognizing a familiar scent, Golzari’s senses came to full alert.
“Do you smell that?” he said softly to Robert.
“Yes, bloody awful,” the Briton replied as the scent of Euphoria became more pronounced. “Really, some people have no taste at all.”
Golzari whipped around to locate the source of the scent he had last encountered in Antioch. The man right behind him was forced to stop and look up. Golzari recognized him instantly: Khalid, the police liaison. Golzari heard the metal snap of a switchblade. Khalid whipped it upward, but the Diplomatic Security agent’s reflexes were too quick. He brought up his left forearm to stop the knife from reaching his torso. The blade cut through the jacket and sliced his arm.
Asha brought his knee up hard into Golzari’s groin. Golzari grunted in pain and doubled over, helpless for the moment. Robert lunged for the attacker but was a step too far away to catch him. Asha began to run across the side street but in his haste again forgot the British traffic pattern. A Mini that had just turned the corner lifted him into the air. Asha nimbly rolled over the hood and landed upright on the far side of the street, where he paused for a moment to glare at the American agent.
Golzari held Asha’s eyes as he pulled the gun from his shoulder holster. “Come on, Robert. I’m okay,” he said, struggling to catch his breath and ignore the pain.
The attacker turned and ran down Shaftsbury, and Golzari and Robert followed. The Somali was already half a block ahead of them, dodging past pedestrians and pushing aside those he couldn’t avoid. Golzari and Robert did the same, unable to gain any ground on him.
When the Somali reached the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus a few blocks later, he realized that he had erred. Without the dark of a side street to conceal him, he was clearly visible to his two pursuers. He looked carefully to his right, having finally learned his lesson about the traffic pattern, then darted across the street to the closest Tube station and jumped over the turnstile. When the policeman standing in front of the station tried to stop him, Asha turned around just long enough to stab him. The officer folded his arms across his stomach and fell to his knees.
As Robert and Golzari charged in and made their way over the turnstile a few seconds later, Golzari paused long enough to check the downed officer, shouting, “Law enforcement!” as he displayed his badge. The officer waved him forward toward the escalator and struggled to his feet to follow, reaching for his radio.
Robert raced down the long escalator only twenty feet behind the Somali with Golzari approaching rapidly from behind. The wounded police officer was valiantly trying to keep pace.
Golzari didn’t bother ordering Khalid to stop. It would have been a waste of breath that he badly needed. Khalid leapt from the final steps of the escalator, taking in the two Tube entrances while he was still in midair and choosing the entrance to his right. He darted past a group of teenagers as lights flashed along the platform, signaling the imminent arrival of the next train. One of the teenagers screamed when she saw the bloody knife in Asha’s hand. The Somali grabbed her and threw her toward Golzari. Robert pressed forward and tried to knock away the switchblade. The Somali planted a fist in Robert’s sternum and then pushed him off the platform into the path of the oncoming train. Robert’s head hit one of the rails as he fell. He lay helpless across the tracks as the train approached the station.
Golzari finally managed to free himself from the hysterical teenager. He grabbed Khalid with one hand and pointed his gun at Khalid’s head with the other. Khalid made no attempt to pull away. He simply smiled and inclined his head toward the tracks below the platform. Golzari only had a split second to act, and he didn’t need even that long to make his decision. He released Khalid, jumped onto the tracks, and pulled Robert’s body between the rails, pressing his torso down as the oncoming train’s horn blared. There simply wasn’t enough time to heft him back onto the platform. Sparks flew as the screeching brakes desperately tried to stop the lead car. Golzari flung himself against the far wall, hoping he had done enough to save his friend.
Asha watched as the train moved over the body lying between the tracks, then spun about on one foot and pushed his way through the cluster of horrified teenagers toward the exit, pausing to smile and wave his knife at the wounded police officer, who had finally made his way to the scene. Then he raced out of the station.
The train stopped in front of the stunned teenagers and the doors opened. An automated female voice came over the speakers: “Mind the gap!”
DAY 5
London, 0431 (GMT)
Damien Golzari closed his eyes and sank back into the soft chair beside the hospital bed. He hadn’t slept during the surgery and had allowed himself to relax now only because Robert was no longer in critical condition and had regained consciousness long enough for the doctor to tell him how lucky he was to be alive; it was an attempt to temper the news that he had lost part of his right arm.
“Da
mien?”
The slurred voice brought Golzari out of his drowsy state.
“Right here, Robert.”
“Where’s the bastard?”
“He got away.”
“You saved my life.”
“It’s my fault that it needed saving. I shouldn’t have drawn you into this.”
“We have both been in this a long time. We know the risks,” he said weakly, though he couldn’t hide the pain in his face.
“How do you feel?”
Robert looked down at the bandages covering the spot where his arm had been amputated. “Like Horatio Nelson after the Battle of Santa Cruz.”
Golzari smiled at Robert’s courage.
Robert fought to stay awake as his eyes began to close. “What now?”
“I’ll stay as long as you need me, Robert.”
“Bollocks. Go get the bastard.”
U.S. Embassy, Sana’a, 1500 (GMT)
If only she had more people working for her, C. J. thought, she’d have been able to keep Connor Stark on a much tighter leash. She hadn’t brought him halfway around the world just to have him disappear.
“Going to have dinner with a friend,” read his cryptic email. “Back soon.” Going to have dinner with a friend, my ass, she fumed.
She knew he wasn’t with Maddox. And she’d checked with the head of the Marine detachment—Stark had signed out an SUV and left the compound alone. Damn it, he knows there have been attacks around here. Damn stupid-ass stunt. She pedaled faster.
The gym in the basement was empty save for her. The stark white room was nothing like the posh facility she belonged to at home, but for the moment it was all hers. She’d decreed that only she had access to it whenever she worked out, much to the consternation of the embassy’s Marines, who believed that total access to gyms was not only a necessity but a birthright. Every ten minutes a Marine would look through the window to see if the coast was clear. She could see the annoyance in their faces that she—not just an outsider, but a civilian—had invaded their space.
“If Connor gets killed, it’s his own damned fault,” she said aloud as she pulled harder on the oscillating handles. She hadn’t noticed on the display that she’d already burned eight hundred calories in forty-five minutes.
Still with energy to burn, C. J. slowed her pace, removing her hands from the machine’s arms and continuing to power it with only her legs as she picked up the towel draped over the weight machine next to her and wiped the sweat from her dripping face. The television screen mounted on the wall in front of her played one of the twenty-four-hour cable news channels. In forty-five minutes of watching, the only news she’d gotten was from the ticker running along the bottom of the screen; the anchor and the various commentators had spent the entire time focused on the latest antics of a blond pop star she’d never heard of. Nothing about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or North Korea. Nothing about the activities on her beloved Capitol Hill, where she knew every senior staffer and could always predict which senators could be turned on key votes— where she’d worked with Connor Stark all those years ago. “Damn him,” she said again, wiping the sweat from her forehead and neck.
For at least the fiftieth time since she had arrived in Yemen she questioned her sanity for choosing this post over the more desirable ones she had been offered. In the end, it came down to her passionate desire to change the world for the better and her conviction that she could. The privileged child of parents famed in the music world, she had spent the last two decades of her professional life looking for opportunities to do that. After graduating from Georgetown, summa cum laude, she had entered the Foreign Service. Junior employees seldom got plum assignments, and hers had been one of the worst. After two years in the Foreign Service—two years of wasting her time on diplomatic make-work and dissimulation—she decided that she could do more good elsewhere and got a job on Capitol Hill. In comparison with her present situation, though, the two years in Haiti had been a piece of cake. But then she hadn’t been the ambassador, only a junior employee at an embassy during an era of relative peace. Here she sat on the periphery of a maelstrom with an apparently insoluble problem: How could she convince the Yemenis to help oppose the pirates? What could she do to motivate them? Perhaps most important, how could a woman—a young black woman—earn the respect necessary to do her job in a notoriously male-oriented culture?
In the women’s locker room, C. J. slipped off her sneakers, removed her sports bra and shorts, and made her way to the farthest of the three shower stalls. It wasn’t the high-tech Mandarin Oriental spa she regularly frequented in D.C., but at least the showers worked today.
She entered the stall and turned the showerhead to “pulsate,” letting the hot water massage her back and shoulder muscles. People are the same everywhere, she thought. On Capitol Hill and here in Yemen. Everyone can be motivated by the right cause or the right price. I can do this.
She just needed to figure out what the Yemenis wanted. She’d tried approaching their foreign minister, but after a single meeting at which she presented her credentials he had been “too busy” to see her again. Some days she thought that nothing had changed since her time as a young staffer on the Hill when U.S. policymakers refused to take her seriously, figuratively patting her on the head dismissively whenever she had an idea (and sometimes literally patting her on the behind, whether she had an idea or not). Although she was the official representative of a superpower, the Yemeni Foreign Ministry still treated her as a second-class citizen. She couldn’t twist their arms—especially since she couldn’t even extend her arm to them without causing offense. She had tried bartering with them for oil rights. She had gotten the Department of Defense to send the Yemenis new patrol craft but received nothing in return. Bribery hadn’t worked. She offered more foreign assistance; they politely refused. That left only one option: constituent influence. And in a country where democracy was as foreign as she was, that seemed unlikely to work. This government wasn’t about to empower its people lest a greater insurgent movement than had already emerged in a few cities sweep it from power.
She turned around to rinse off the cheap liquid soap the General Services Office provided to the embassy. As she reached up to adjust the shower-head she remembered another shower in Eastern Europe. She had been on a CODEL—congressional delegation—trip years before, escorting her boss. She and Senator Hamilton Becker of Massachusetts had both had just enough to drink when she quietly joined him in his room and went from adviser to very private girlfriend. He was the inconsistent constant in her life.
She shook her head and opened her eyes. Focus, she told herself. There’s no time for memories. She tilted her head back and enjoyed the feel of the water pounding on her eyelids. She opened her mouth, and let the water pour in, allowing most of it to fall over her lower lip. Constituent influence might work, even in a nondemocratic country. People wanted governments to take action, didn’t they? And she could use Connor to do it. But how to handle him? Connor Stark despised being handled; he had hated it even when he was in the Navy. He had to do things his own way. That could work. All she had to do was give him a well-defined job, point him in the general direction, and let him be Connor Stark. He knew the Yemenis and they knew him, and she had to trust that he could arrange the access she needed. She just hoped he wouldn’t make the same type of poor decision that had destroyed his Navy career a decade before.
Stark had been correct back in her office: she really had to be desperate to place her expectations for success on someone who had never been able to do things through the proper channels—a man who in the past had taken on a terrorist cell without the authority of the U.S. government behind him and had undiplomatically challenged an allied nation. Would he plunge this country into further turmoil or help secure U.S. national security interests? She wished she knew.
Sana’a, 1510 (GMT)
Stark knew exactly where he was going when he pulled out of the U.S. embassy’s compound onto the streets of Sana’a
. Little had changed since his last visit. A few more barricades had been added to protect the embassy from car bombs. Otherwise, the city looked much as it always had. The brick buildings with their unique patterned designs still crowded up against the streets. Slender minarets still pierced the skyline. The buildings packed within the ancient walled city were home to nearly two million people, but few of them were out at this time of day. He had traveled less than a quarter mile when the rearview mirror showed that a car had begun to follow him.
He had driven through the city center before and knew it to be the most direct way to the restaurant, but instead he chose to wind his way through various side streets—a counterterrorism measure the embassy advised all personnel to follow. The other car stayed with him.
He parked in front of the red awning that shaded the entrance to the restaurant and checked the odometer before exiting the SUV and handing the car keys to a valet—along with a generous sum of Yemeni riyals to ensure that the vehicle remained dent-free. He walked cautiously into the restaurant, well aware that he would stand out as a foreigner. Most of the men inside wore the traditional long white robe and mashadda headdress. Even had he tried to dress like a local, however, no one would mistake him for anything other than a Westerner. He appeared to be the only foreigner in the restaurant.
“Mutahar,” he said quietly to the maitre d’ who greeted him. The man silently motioned for Stark to follow. Conversations came to a standstill as each head in the restaurant turned to follow the American’s progress through the room. Stark seemed not to notice the stares as the maitre d’ led him through the heavy smoke and the enticing aromas of lamb, coriander, garlic, and cumin to a large room in the back.
Two men stood in front of the heavy damask curtains that guarded the entrance. Stark had no way of knowing whether they were private or state security. It hardly mattered. They scrutinized him carefully before separating the curtains to let him through.
The Aden Effect Page 8
