The girl was waiting at the bar, looking much more cheerful than when he’d left her.
“I so much appreciate this,” she told him. “Some friends of mine are having a party and I’ll bet they just got hammered and forgot about me. My name is Heather.”
“Heather,” he said. “Calluna vulgaris. A beautiful name. Mine is Mahmoud.”
They shook hands.
He’d nearly gotten her to his car when he heard tires screeching. A red convertible pulled up, stopping suddenly. In it were three girls, screaming through the open windows.
“Heather, we’re so sorry,” one called out. “Are you okay? We came to give you a ride. My cell died.”
“These are my friends,” Heather told Jaburi, relieved. “You guys, I was so like worried you’d forgotten me. I even had to get this old guy to give me a ride. Thank you so much, Mr. Mahmoud. I really appreciate your offer. See you later.”
The blond girl drove off with her friends.
Jaburi tossed his car keys once in the air, then pocketed them and headed back to his room. As he did, he walked past a rented white Dodge Intrepid, where Walter Ford sat, watching him.
The section Walter had assigned his students had gone well, both in his Research and Evaluation Methods class and in his Statistical Analysis class. Some students had grumbled that it seemed like a lot of busywork for nothing, but that was exactly the point. Others found exactly what he was trying to teach them, that the powerful new search and evaluation tools available to modern law enforcement were revolutionizing police work, and if it often seemed true that old forms of tedium were merely being replaced with new ones, in the end, it was worth it—that the value of patience had gone up, not down, with the advance of technologies.
They’d started from the list DeLuca’s brother-in-law, Tom, at Homeland Security had obtained for them and added another 531 names to it. They’d identified the top one hundred academics in order of frequent flier miles racked up. His students formed two-man teams and divided the subjects between them. They’d developed parameters for measuring an individual’s political leanings, using profiling guidelines developed by Homeland Security. When he brought in a political science professor from MIT who’d done a statistical analysis of revolutionary movements throughout history that proved, with an 89 percent degree of accuracy, that most radical social movements were led by men (or women) who’d been the youngest-born in their families, each team ranked their suspects in order of birth order and concentrated on the top two. When a religion professor spoke to his classes and said that the most radical believers were often converts or prodigal sons returned to the fold, the teams looked for academics whose views weren’t simply extreme or overpolitical but had changed in the last ten years. Academic writings, papers, and books were collected and assembled, scanned and entered as text files.
Ford’s interest was piqued, however, one night when one of his more gifted students, a boy named Eli, told him he’d found something interesting, a man named Mahmoud Jaburi, a highly respected professor emeritus at Princeton, currently on sabbatical. He’d been born in America, the son of an imam and Islamic scholar who’d taught at Yale until he was recalled to Baghdad to head a mosque there. The Jaburis constituted the largest of the Euphrates tribes, and the surname was the name most frequently cited when Eli ran a check of prisoners currently being held by coalition forces in Iraq. What excited Eli was genealogical research he’d done, revealing that not only was Professor Mahmoud Jaburi the twelfth of twelve sons, but his father, the imam, was thirteenth of thirteen, and his grandfather was ninth of nine. Further research indicated that while Mahmoud Jaburi’s writings were extremely liberal-minded when he was a younger man, and quite brilliant (his IQ was reported to approach 200, with a virtually photographic memory), his views had shifted 180 degrees upon the death of his father to become radically conservative.
It got Walter Ford curious, so he’d isolated Jaburi’s travel patterns and asked Tom to run a correlation for terrorist chatter. In each city where Jaburi visited, in the days after, terrorist chatter increased. The statistical probability that it would increase consistently after each and every visit was low, yet correlation did not imply causality. Jaburi was a popular, charismatic man, with several websites dedicated to him. Transcripts of his speeches were disseminated through such websites, posted by ardent followers who taped his speeches and preserved them in cyberspace. It wasn’t until Ford broke down Jaburi’s transcribed speeches that he became truly suspicious. Jaburi had used the phrase “thousand faces” more than twenty times in the last year, never in the context of explicitly identifying a terrorist group by that name, but in a more general sense. Perhaps it was just a phrase he liked, Ford thought. Or was it something in his subconscious slipping out?
Jaburi was charismatic. He was familiar with America and American customs, and he spoke English without an accent. He was trusted by the U.S. government and had often sat on government panels in the past. He was wealthy enough to travel freely, though he had a wife and two young children, rendering him less suspicious than a single man traveling alone. He had contacts and connections all over the country. And everywhere he went, the chatter increased. And in the last year or two, his message had become increasingly apocalyptic and full of doom.
That was enough for Ford to want to see him in person.
He’d flown to Tucson, using frequent flyer miles, and attended the lecture. He’d been enormously impressed by the man’s breadth of knowledge and faculty for recall, as if he had a million facts and names at his fingertips. He’d seen Jaburi get into the car with a young Arab girl after the reception. He’d followed as they drove past the convention center, past a large hotel and then the airport. It didn’t seem like a typical city tour. And then, much to his surprise, he’d seen the older man raise his hand and strike the girl, an arm flying across the front seat, clearly silhouetted in the rear window by the lights of an approaching car, even though he’d been of the impression that Jaburi and the girl had never met before.
He watched Jaburi meet the blond girl in the bar, and he watched as the blond girl got into the red sports car and drove off with her friends.
Perhaps it was nothing, but Walter Ford had a feeling that the blond girl had been very lucky. He took the digital voice recorder he carried with him at all times and made a note to call Eli in the morning and ask him if he wanted to do any work for extra credit, cross-checking Jaburi’s travel patterns against sex crimes in the FBI register.
DeLuca was happy to observe that his gas gauge was no longer dropping. They were somewhere in high country. They kept going. They crossed a ridge, the road traversing a basin and range topography, negotiated a pair of switchbacks and descended to a primitive caravansary that looked more like a cemetery than a town. DeLuca saw no electric lights, only a single kerosene lantern in the center of town, tended by an old man who looked at them, expressionless, as they approached. DeLuca stopped the car, and Evelyn Warner asked the old man if he could tell them where they might find a doctor. He pointed down the road.
“He says next village,” she told DeLuca. He looked at the gas gauge.
“Did he say how far?”
“Half a day,” she said. “But that’s by camel.”
They crossed a vast rock-strewn pediment, circled a volcanic crag, and climbed for another thirty minutes to a high pass. DeLuca had hoped, crossing the pass, to see the lights of a city below, but he saw only darkness. Soon enough, the empty gas gauge warning light lit up. They were still in the middle of nowhere. DeLuca always assumed you had another gallon of gas before you were really out, but he’d never tested that assumption. Evelyn thought that was something he ought to know, as a former police officer.
“I don’t recall telling you I used to be a cop,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to the backseat, where Khalil had either fallen asleep or passed out.
“I’m a reporter,” she told him. “I often research the people I meet. Did you know that someone put a b
ounty on your head?”
“I’d heard,” he said. “Ten thousand dollars. It’s nice to know what you’re worth.”
“I heard fifteen,” she said.
“It’s gone up, then,” he told her.
He saw a light in the distance, and then a town, not much bigger than the last one, with a few houses that had two stories, but again no trees. There seemed to be some kind of central village square, where they saw a dry fountain, a donkey, and a car, an old Trabant. At the far corner of the square, he saw a light above a door where he recognized the Arabic word for “police.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to the police, or answer any questions. It had to be well after midnight. No one was about.
Then he saw, down a side street, what he was looking for, a sign hanging from a pole and, on the sign, a physician’s caduceus, along with another symbol in Arabic that he didn’t recognize. With the engine off, the town was dead silent.
“You might want to keep the engine on,” the Englishwoman said.
“I might want to,” he agreed, “but we just ran out.”
The doctor was a young man, a Kurd, reed thin, with a close-cropped beard. His wife came to the door as well, tying off her bathrobe, an apprehensive expression on her face.
They brought Khalil in, laying him flat on the doctor’s examination table, and then the doctor suggested DeLuca roll the vehicle into an empty garage across the street, where he would deal with it in the morning. Ansar al-Islam controlled the village, he warned, though the people were PUK sympathizers and by and large supported coalition efforts in Iraq. The doctor was the only person in the village, other than the police, who had electricity twenty-four hours a day. The others in the village were only allowed it for four hours in the morning and four hours in the evening, at least until the hydroelectric project to the north of town was completed. The village was called Hukt. They were about five miles east of the Iraq border and twenty from Sulaymaniyeh. When DeLuca asked him if he could get any gasoline, the doctor shook his head. Getting gas could take days.
“There is a bus to the border,” the doctor said. “Once you are there, I think you could cross. I will take care of your friend.”
The next morning, the bus dropped them off at a refugee camp a short distance from the boundary dividing Iran and Iraq. There had to be somewhere between five and ten thousand people in the camp. DeLuca saw displaced people with thousand-yard stares on their faces, mothers giving their children crackers for supper, a woman with a teenage boy so sick he could hardly move, another boy using the branch of a tree for a crutch, his leg red and inflamed. In the distance, a fight broke out in the men’s section of the camp, where he was told by a Swiss aid worker that recruiters for Ansar al-Islam and Al Qaeda were at work, urging young men to join them and fight the good fight. In the women’s section, he saw four men from a white Isuzu van, examining the women closely, and occasionally, they’d tell a girl to stand up and turn around. Evelyn identified them as slave traders, telling girls they could get them work as domestic servants in rich Saudi or Kuwaiti households, and then they’d take them to brothels in Turkey instead. The camp was a scene of anguish, and fear, and most of all, chaos.
It wasn’t hard to slip back across the border into Iraq.
Two miles down the road, they found an American patrol and surrendered to them. Lacking identification, it took a few phone calls before the patrol released them.
Chapter Twelve
DELUCA WAS OUTRAGED WHEN HE HEARD THE news. While he had been in Iran, a second raid had been conducted at the home of Omar Hadid. This time, the mission had ended badly. They’d received a tip that the home was housing armed insurgents, a tip that was confirmed by aerial surveillance. The day before, a car bomb on the road leading to the base had pulled up next to a Humvee full of infantrymen before exploding, killing six Americans and leaving the rest of their battalion hungry for revenge. A convoy was sent, Humvees, Bradleys, and, this time, four Abrams A-1 tanks. As DeLuca understood it, the convoy was again fired upon from the house, this time by rocket-propelled grenades. The tanks opened fire, and the house was quickly reduced to a pile of rubble and ash. When the smoke cleared, they found twelve bodies, two women and ten men, including that of Ali Hadid. The two women were his wives. Kamel Hadid had been seriously injured and taken to the hospital. Omar, who’d not been present at the time of the raid, had been located and arrested. He was being held at Camp Anaconda, pending interrogation.
Reicken had ordered the raid. DeLuca had half a mind to walk into his office and dump his desk on top of him, but unfortunately, Specialist Washington told him the lieutenant colonel was going to be working in the Green Zone for a few days.
DeLuca gave orders to have Omar Hadid brought to him.
When he walked into Tent City, his friend Sami was waiting for him, looking like somebody had just beat him to a free parking spot in Kenmore Square before a Red Sox game. Next to him, DeLuca saw, was a German shepherd, who looked on, curious.
“How was your flight?” he asked. “What’s with the dog?”
“It’s not my dog,” Sami said.
“Okay,” DeLuca said. “Flight good?”
Sami glared at him.
“Food okay?”
Sami glared at him.
“I imagine you’re curious to know why I’ve invited you here today . . .”
“Invited?” Sami spat. “You think I’m here because I was fucking invited? I’m thinking of putting my fucking boat up for sale because my daughter . . .” DeLuca let his old friend vent for another few minutes. He knew that beneath Sami’s gruff exterior, there was a gruff interior, but inside that, he had a heart of—well, his heart was gruff, too, but somewhere in there was the most loyal friend a man could ever hope for, and DeLuca had asked for him because he needed a loyal friend, and one who spoke fluent Arabic. Sami was finishing up. “. . . eight weeks, just to get reimbursed for the fucking airline ticket. If ever.”
“You done?” DeLuca asked.
“I’m just getting started,” his friend said. “But fill me in and maybe I’ll tell you the rest of it later. If I’m still here.”
DeLuca briefed his friend as completely as he could, taking him from the initial raid on Omar Hadid’s house right up to what he knew about the second raid. Sami listened closely. DeLuca had always been surprised at the kind of close attention Sami was able to pay and the things he was able to notice and remember. Sami was highly intuitive. When he was done, he asked Sami if he had any questions.
“So you want to pull in this Al-Tariq guy, or do you want to let him swim a little bit while you get his people?”
“Pull him in,” DeLuca said. “Maybe if we take him out, somebody else will step up, but we think they’re more likely to scatter.”
“So what’s my role?” Sami Jambazian asked.
“What I need from you,” DeLuca said, “is to hang around here and figure out who’s been tipping people off about me.”
“You’re talking about the ransom. I mean bounty. Whatever.”
“Yeah,” DeLuca said. “I’m not worried, personally, but it’s already compromising operations. So far I’m guessing it’s just some asshole who wants the money, but if Al-Tariq’s alive, then I could see how the guy might turn into Al-Tariq’s eyes and ears around here and maybe do more damage than just clipping me.”
Sami thought a moment. When he dangled his hand over the edge of his folding chair, the dog nuzzled it, looking for attention. Sami scratched the dog behind the ear.
“And you think the car bomb in—what was the name of the town?”
“Ashur.”
“You think that was for you?”
“Maybe,” he said. “It could be a coincidence.”
“So how do you want me to play it?”
“Up to you,” DeLuca said.
“Hmm,” Sami said, thinking again. “Maybe I’m a disgruntled Arab-American . . .”
“And/or a devout Muslim,” DeLuca said.
“Shit
,” Sami said. “I haven’t read the Koran since I was fifteen. Okay. My parents would love this. Anyway, something like that.”
“You could pretend you’re in some sort of financial difficulty,” DeLuca said.
“I could pretend that,” Sami said. “Let me just take a second and figure out what that might feel like. Okay, got it. So what’s my job? What’s my unit?”
“Whatever you think would help,” DeLuca said. “CI can wear any uniform we want when we work a case, or if you want, you can go sterile and nobody knows your rank, name, or unit. Or you can be a civilian. Whatever you see fit.”
“Can I be a general?”
“You could,” DeLuca said. “Though I don’t know if anybody’s going to believe a general is going to do a hit on a sergeant for fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Shit. Good point,” Sami said. He thought some more. “I’m thinking I’m just a lousy weekend warrior with maxed-out credit cards and a bitch for a wife back home who wants more alimony. Where’s a place I could work where I’d meet everybody?”
“Mess hall,” DeLuca said. “I know a kid in CSS who’d be dying to help you. I’ll take you to meet him. His name is Jimmy.”
Vasquez entered and interrupted them. DeLuca made the introductions.
“I don’t know who the dog is,” DeLuca said. “He seems to be visiting us.”
“That’s Smoky, man,” said Vasquez. “I worked with him in Tikrit and had him transferred. They were going to get rid of him and loan him to the South Koreans, but those people eat dogs, man. I had to rescue him.”
“He’s military police?”
“Fully trained,” Vasquez said. “He’s good on checkpoints but not much use for guard duty. That’s what they were saying, anyway. Doesn’t have a mean bone in him.”
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