Team Red

by David DeBatto

  religious-zealot combo situation. Antonov last reported in London. Will ask MI6 to pick him up.

  The kids want to know when their uncle Dave is coming home. I suppose you’re wondering the same thing.

  Tommy

  He was about to log off when he saw the flag go up immediately on his e-mail box. He’d received a reply from Walter Ford, who’d written:

  David,

  I’m drumming my fingers over this one, but I gotta tell you, Jaburi’s not the guy. I had a talk with some people in Washington, and anyway, to make a long story short, I was wrong about Jaburi, so I’m off the job. Sammy and I are going fishing on the Cape. A little vacation would feel good, right now. You should call Sammy one of these days. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.

  Walter

  DeLuca read the e-mail twice to make sure he understood it. Walter was trying to tell him someone, probably the “people in Washington,” was watching his e-mail, so that he could no longer talk freely. He knew by the reference to “drumming my fingers” that Walter meant the opposite of what he was saying, because drumming his fingers was his poker tell, the thing he sometimes did, without knowing it, when he was bluffing. “I gotta tell you . . .” meant “I’m being forced to say this,” again probably by “people in Washington.” The reference to going on vacation and fishing was wrong, too. Walter Ford hated fishing, nor had Ford taken a vacation in forty years. “You should call Sammy” suggested he suspected his phones were being tapped, and that if he wanted to communicate, he should do so through their mutual friend, and he’d probably misspelled Sami’s name on purpose. The specificity of mentioning the Cape probably meant they really were going to the Cape.

  A quick call to Sami confirmed his interpretation.

  “I don’t know what he’s up to, but he told me to get my boat ready because he was going to take me up on that offer to go fishing,” Sami said.

  “Didn’t you tell him he was the last guy you’d ever want to take fishing?” DeLuca said.

  “Exactly,” Sami said. “This guy Timmons sounds greasy to me. Instead of saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, we got it covered,’ he starts waving his dick in the air.”

  “I wish I could say you got nothing to worry about,” DeLuca said. “I got a few friends in high places, but not that many and not that high.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sami said. “We’re big boys.”

  “Yeah, but they’re bigger,” DeLuca said.

  Walter Ford was in his office when he received the report on Mahmoud Jaburi’s DNA. The report consisted of pages of numerical sequences in rows and columns that meant little to Ford, but the statistical analysis of those numbers was revealing. The results of the lab report had been broken down into seven files, with the note added: “Presume sample 1 is Mahmoud Jaburi. Cannot identify the other six.”

  Other six?

  “Where did you get this sample from?” O’Leary asked Ford. He’d driven to the local Stop and Shop to use the pay phone to call his friend at the FBI.

  “A hairbrush,” Ford told him.

  “From where—the locker room at the YMCA? This thing had seven different people on it. Who lets seven other people use their hairbrush? I’ll get back to you,” O’Leary said.

  “It’s better if I call you,” Ford said. “How long do you think it might take?”

  “Couple hours,” O’Leary said.

  Ford knew only that Jaburi would be on Cape Cod, at the end of Ramadan. “On Cape Cod” needed some narrowing down. He asked for volunteers among his students to help him search property titles on the Cape. Nothing came up using the name “Jaburi.” His best student, Eli, suggested calling every house-cleaning service in the phone book, since Jaburi had asked his wife to arrange for having their summer place cleaned. When a Yellow Pages survey failed to produce results, Eli and his girlfriend and a couple of friends spent a Saturday visiting every village and laundromat bulletin board from Buzzard’s Bay to P-town, writing down the numbers of private entrepreneurs who’d put up signs advertising cleaning services. Sure enough, Eli eventually found a woman from Senegal who’d put up a sign in a laundromat in North Eastham. She said she’d received a call from a woman named Aafia Jaburi, who’d asked her to prepare a home in Wellfleet, on Nauset Road. She told Eli the address, after he promised to keep her name out of it, since she was technically an illegal immigrant working for cash only.

  A call to the harbormaster in Wellfleet confirmed that a forty-four-foot sailboat, Aafia’s Ark, was registered to one Mahmoud Jaburi, who had a year-round slippage rented in Wellfleet Harbor. He also had private slippage at his home out on Indian Neck, across the harbor from the downtown area.

  “Why two slips?” Walter asked him.

  “I guess he keeps one in town for when he wants to sail across the bay instead of drive,” the harbormaster said. “Maybe he just wants a place to show off his boat—it’s a beautiful boat. Cherubini ketch, bronze hardware, teak decks, gorgeous brightwork. He’s a good guy. Solid taxpayer.”

  “Yeah?” Ford asked. “How so? The ‘good guy’ thing?”

  “Just in general,” the harbormaster said. “Tips the kids at the fuel dock. Files float plans when he’s going to be gone for a while so we can rent his slip out to the weekenders. That sort of thing.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ford said. “He file one recently?”

  “Let me look,” the harbormaster said. Ford could hear him shuffling through a sheaf of papers. His hunch was that if Jaburi made a practice of filing float plans, he wouldn’t vary his routine now, lest that raise suspicions. He was right.

  “Yup,” the harbormaster said. “He left this morning. Due back . . . that’s funny.”

  “What’s funny?” Walter said. “Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?”

  “Funny peculiar,” the harbormaster said. “It’s just that he left the return date open. Maybe he didn’t know and he was going to call it in later.”

  “He say where he was going?”

  “Well,” the harbormaster said, sounding puzzled. “Nowhere around here, I can tell you that. Just the coordinates—39.70 north and 44.28 east. That’s about due east from here, but . . . Jesus, 44 east is halfway around the world. He must have meant west, which is . . . hang on . . . halfway to the Azores. That can’t be right. Huh.”

  “Because why?”

  “Well, that boat’s not weighted for open ocean,” the harbormaster said. “Last I heard, anyway. Sailing to the Azores is not exactly a family outing.”

  “Just out of curiosity, where exactly is the first place you said, whatever it was?” Walter asked.

  “Let me get my atlas,” the harbormaster said. Ford heard a further shuffling of papers, pages turning. It took the harbormaster a few minutes before he came back on the line.

  “Well,” he said, laughing. “Either the guy is making a joke or he thinks the world is ending.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because 39.70 north and 44.28 east are the latitude and longitude for Mount Ararat.”

  “Thanks for your help,” Ford said.

  He called Sami, who said he could have his boat ready in fifteen minutes. With traffic, it was four hours to Wellfleet by car or two by boat, and Walter didn’t think he had that much time to spare.

  Sami ran flat out, glad that he’d gone ahead and had a new diesel engine put in before he’d deployed to Iraq. He’d figured he’d find a way to pay for it when he got back. The new engine was a 635 HP Cummins electronic diesel with less than two hundred hours on it, still in its first service interval and under warranty. The new engine’s 635 horsepower drove The Lady J as fast as any in the sports-fishing charter fleet, while its large beam made it a well-behaved vessel even in heavy seas. All the same, Walter found the four- to six-foot swells of Cape Cod Bay to be nauseating, the problem only slightly ameliorated by the Dramamine patches Sami kept on board for his seasick customers.

  They passed the P-town ferry where it turned toward Wood End Light and steere
d a course to the southeast, rounded Chequesett Point and headed north into Wellfleet Harbor. Walter had used Sami’s cell phone to call the local sheriff, who met them on the dock, which would have been difficult to find from the sea without his assistance. He told them Jaburi’s summer house was all closed up.

  “No sign of anybody around,” he said.

  “Did you look inside?” Ford asked.

  “We’d need a search warrant for that,” the sheriff said.

  “Of course we would,” Ford said. “Unless we thought someone inside might be injured.”

  “That would, of course, be the exception,” the sheriff agreed.

  “Somebody hurt so bad that they’re unable to call for help,” Sami said.

  “You guys have reason to think that might be the case?”

  “Well, I don’t hear anything,” Sami said.

  “Neither do I,” Ford said.

  “We’d better have a look inside, then,” the sheriff said.

  The house was a red cedar-sided cottage with white trim, with cedar shakes on the roof, a deck, and a manicured lawn where the dune grasses and beach plums left off, with beds of tiger lilies bobbing in the wind. They looked in vain for a spare key, then broke a pane in the door to the kitchen and let themselves in. Everything inside was tidy, the beds made, nothing in the refrigerator that looked like it was going to spoil or go bad soon. The trash outside the kitchen door contained the shuckings from sweet corn and lobster shells that stank as only lobster shells could. It looked like the Jaburi family had had one last shore dinner.

  Upstairs, on a shelf above the bathroom sink, Ford found four small vials of a clear, slightly brown liquid. He put them in a ziplocked evidence bag, put that bag in another bag, put those two in a third, wrapped a large pillow around the vials and tied the pillow tight with a pair of shoelaces he took from shoes in the closet, inserted the pillow inside four sealed garbage bags and placed the entire package inside a garbage can, which he sealed with duct tape. He wasn’t sure, of course, what could be in the vials, but he had an idea that it could be something very bad.

  Sami had searched the car in the driveway, a new-model Cadillac that was clean, save for two pieces of evidence. The first was a small strip of paper, about six centimeters long and a centimeter wide, perforated at one edge with holes punched every half inch or so, which he found beneath the accelerator, as if it had been stuck to the bottom of the driver’s shoe. Walter said it looked, to him, like the end strip from a Federal Express shipping invoice. The second piece of evidence he’d found was the plastic case for a .38-caliber Colt automatic, which Sami had found under the driver’s seat. Empty.

  Walter and Sami stood on the deck, where they were joined by the sheriff. The sun was setting in the west, the sky a riot of reds, oranges, and pinks blazing on the horizon. A dozen seagulls had landed on the lawn, which Sami said meant bad weather was coming.

  “Look,” Ford said to the sheriff, a man named Svoboda. “I appreciate your help here, but given that I don’t have any jurisdiction, I’m going to need a little more help, I’m afraid.”

  “Just tell me what you need,” the sheriff said.

  “First,” Ford said, “we’re going to need the phone records of all calls going in or out of here for the last month or so at least.”

  “Not a problem,” the sheriff said.

  “Second,” Ford said, “I don’t want to worry you, but you’re going to have to call your wife and tell her you’re not coming home. I gotta go inside and make some calls, but before I do, I’m really sorry, but we’re all quarantined. Nobody leaves until we get the all-clear, but I’m sure that we will, so as I said, don’t worry about it. There’s beers in the fridge if anybody wants one. I’ll be out after I make my calls.”

  Inside the house, he called the New York Homeland Security office, where he informed Tom Miecowski of what he’d learned and what he’d been up to. He called the Centers for Disease Control and explained the situation, that he might have exposed himself to a biological warfare weapon, and he gave them the location where they could find him. He gave the same information to the Boston FBI office, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Then he called David DeLuca, reaching his voice mail, and told him if it was at all possible, that maybe he could have Scottie send one of his satellites over that part of the Atlantic Ocean to help look for a forty-four-foot sailboat named Aafia’s Ark, make Cherubini, color white, two masts, main and mizzen, three sails including the jib, teak decks, and bronze metal stuff, if that helped, currently within one day’s sail from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, somewhere out there in the big blue ocean, but maybe Scottie could help narrow it down a bit. Finally, he called his wife, Martha, and told her not to wait up for him because he wasn’t going to be able to make it home tonight. After he hung up, he uttered a brief prayer, hoping he’d be well enough to see her one last time before the disease took him, if that was what fate had in store for him.

  Before he made any of these calls, he’d dialed *69 on Jaburi’s phone. The last call Jaburi had received came from a number in Virginia, at 703-482-0623. When Ford dialed it, a receptionist answered with the words, “Central Intelligence Agency, may I help you?”

  DeLuca slept fitfully and woke when he felt someone gently jostling him. He opened his eyes and saw Dan standing next to him.

  “Hey, Chief,” Dan said. “I woulda let you sleep but you said you wanted to hear as soon as we heard from Kaplan.”

  DeLuca sat up, surprised to discover, after a few moments, that his neck actually felt better. He looked at his watch. It was 0900 hours. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept that long. He looked at his sat phone and realized it had come unplugged from its recharger while he slept. He cursed, plugging it back in. Goddamn technology. He’d missed three calls while he slept. Before he checked his messages, he read the note that Dan had brought him. It was from Kaplan. The note said:

  Mr. David. Sorry. Your “vaccine” sample is nothing more than green tea. They say it’s good for you, but it’s not going to stop a plague, I’m afraid. Keep me informed.

  Kaplan

  It made sense. If Al-Tariq were supplying a thousand agents with what they understood to be a deadly toxin, then the more people involved, the greater the odds that one of them was going to lose his or her courage. Give them what they think is an antidote, tell them they’re not going to be hurt, and they’re going to feel invulnerable.

  “By the way,” Dan said. “FYI, you know how I said I was getting out, as soon as my two years are up?”

  “Yeah?” DeLuca said.

  “Well, that’s changed,” Dan said. “I’m reenlisting.”

  “May I ask why?” DeLuca asked.

  “The way I see it,” Sykes said, “I can do more good here than I could anywhere else. For now, anyway.”

  “That’s how I saw it, too,” DeLuca said.

  “My old man’s gonna shit the bed when I tell him.”

  “How about your fiancée—what’s she going to say?”

  “I already told her,” he said. “She dumped me.”

  “I’m sorry,” DeLuca said.

  “I was, too, at first,” Dan said. “But then I thought, what kind of person would break up with somebody because they’re doing what they love? Not to mention something that’s really important. What kind of love is that? How small can you be?”

  “I know what you mean,” DeLuca said. “But it’s not small. It’s just big in a different context.”

  The first missed call was from Walter Ford, who told him Jaburi was on a sailboat somewhere within one day’s sail of Wellfleet, Cape Cod. Walter wondered if they could get any help finding the boat with some of those satellites the army had up there.

  When DeLuca called Sami’s number, an FBI agent named Peterson answered the phone, explaining that Mr. Jambazian was unavailable. DeLuca identified himself and told Peterson Ford and Jambazian were working for him. Peterson said Ford, Jambazian, and a local sheriff named Svoboda
had been quarantined in a mobile CDC decontamination and isolation unit while tests were being conducted. DeLuca was horrified—what had he exposed his friends to?

  “They seem healthy, but we’re going to have to wait and see,” Peterson continued. Peterson’s superior, a doctor named Colonel Seligson, told DeLuca they’d found four small sealed vials in the bathroom of Jaburi’s house.

  “About the size of a tube of Chapstick?” DeLuca said. “Clear brownish-green liquid? Black screw on cap?” Seligson said yes to all three questions. “It’s tea. Check to see if it’s green tea. It’s a placebo. Jaburi didn’t bother with it because he knows it doesn’t work. Tell Walter to call me when he’s out of quarantine. And tell him I’m calling Scott now.”

  Scott agreed to talk to his superiors at Image Intelligence immediately about Walter’s request. It was only a question of what satellites were available and how long it would take to reposition them. There were G-Hawks in Washington, D.C., and a few down in Florida, but they weren’t designed to get anywhere quickly.

  The second call in DeLuca’s voice mailbox was from Evelyn.

  “Hello, David, Warner here in sunny Basra, checking in. How are you? I hope you’re well. I’m quite looking forward to seeing you again. I know you’re busy, but if you could find the time, could you call me and help me with a story I’m doing on that terrible bombing at CI headquarters. I don’t think you chaps have gotten anywhere near your due, so, I thought I might write obituaries for your friends, if that’s possible. I think the world should know what they did and what they died for—you chaps really are the only ones actually winning hearts and minds, as far as I can see, and I’m not just blowing smoke up your arse saying that. Know you’re busy, but call me when you get a chance. You have my number.”

  DeLuca felt bad, but there was no way around it. Someday, the story would come out, but until then, he had to let her swing in the wind.