by Gordon Kent
“Oh, yeah.”
“ ‘Oh, yeah’! Yeah! You heard.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard. I was headed out and they told me to go back to bed. In fact, I’ve been ordered to stay in the hotel until further notice.” Triffler sounded hurt. “I was going to see the pyramids today.”
“You been there three weeks, for Christ’s sake!”
“I’ve been working.”
“Dick, look, I need you to go to the AID office. Now.”
“I’ve been ordered to stay in the hotel.”
“By who?”
“My boss.”
“I’m your boss, as of midnight last night D.C. time.” He had a horrible moment when he thought it might in fact not yet be midnight in D.C.; he tried to figure it and then thought, The hell with it. “Get your ass to the AID office! Or what’s left of it.”
“You’re ordering me?”
Dukas sighed. “Yes.”
“I’ll never see the pyramids.”
“You’ll live. Here’s what I want you to do. When you get there, find somebody in security. It’s maybe a U.S. Marine, but I suspect it’s likelier a local rent-a-cop. He or she’ll have a list of employees. You find out what employee didn’t come to work this morning. Get me?”
“Somebody who didn’t want to get bombed.”
“That’s why I asked for you, Dick, you’re smart.”
“What if the security people got blown up, too?”
“Then we’re fucked.”
“Maybe then I can go to the pyramids.”
“Dick, come on! Now look, you get the name of whoever didn’t report in this morning, then you locate that person. Okay? We need to have the person held, so I guess you’ll need a local cop. You with me?”
“What’s the charge?”
“I don’t think that’ll be a problem; leave it to the local guy. Okay?” Triffler really was smart. Dukas knew that Triffler had been playing him a little, partly because he was smart and partly because he liked other people to lay everything out, to use all the rope they needed to hang themselves. Undoubtedly, he wanted Dukas to see how thin his idea was. And, as a result, Dukas did. He said, “I know it’s iffy, Dick, but it’s all we got right now. Okay? The quicker you move, the better chance you got.”
“Then I’m outta here.”
Dukas gave him the numbers where he was, the contacts in Washington who could find him quickly. When he was done, he said, “What’d you want to see the pyramids for, anyway?”
Triffler hesitated and then said, “Cleopatra was African American, too, you know.” And hung up.
Dukas lumbered back to the big room, where everybody was working at a laptop or a telephone or both, and the sweet buns were gone and the coffee was being refilled. He peeled a banana. “Cram!”
Cram looked up from an armchair like a dog looking up from a stolen steak.
“Cram, get us all on the next flight to Cairo. Soonest, get me? I want to be there now!” He realized that he hadn’t given Cram anything to do. Dukas bit into the banana. “Understand?”
“Cancel the tickets to Nairobi?”
“Get us to Cairo, Cram; we’ll worry about the rest when we get there. Now, okay?” Cram looked uncertain. Dukas raised his voice. “Hey, Biddler—!” The London NCIS man looked up from the far side of the room, where he had been bent over somebody’s laptop. Dukas waved him over. “This is Cram, um, Bob? Bob Cram—um—”
Biddler was shaking Cram’s hand. “Del Biddler.” He must have heard of Cram, but he was polite, nonetheless.
“Yeah, listen, you know the local drill, help Cram get us to Cairo, will you?” Dukas sighed. He had just given Cram a responsibility and then taken it away from him, as he could see from the relief on Cram’s face. Could Cram really be that lazy? Or was he scared? Of—of what? Of being tortured again? That seemed far-fetched. Dukas stared at Cram so long that Cram, perplexed, smiled at him—the bleary smile of a panhandler. Dukas turned away, pretending to have just thought of something, and then he did think of something that had flashed on him while he was talking to Triffler.
“Hey, Geraldine,” he said, sitting down next to her.
She was on a STU nonstop and said “Hold,” and put a hand over the mouthpiece so she could listen to Dukas.
“Didn’t I ask you yesterday to check up on whoever shot the TV footage? The Mombasa thing?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you get?”
“They gave me the runaround.”
“Lean on them. I want a name and I want the unedited tape. The Cairo thing, something gravels me—I dunno—”
“They gave me the name. It was the tape I didn’t get—hold on—” She was tapping out keys on the smallest laptop Dukas had ever seen, an HP Jornada the size of a book. She muttered “Shit,” and then “Big fingers, I got big fingers,” and then she stared at the screen and said, “Jean-Marc Balcon. French guy, I think.”
Dukas moved himself around so he could see the little screen and then copied the name into his black appointment book. Unlike many people, Dukas couldn’t use a computer for notes, appointments, jottings. He needed paper. “You too busy to follow this up right now?” he said.
Geraldine smiled, held up the telephone. “Am I busy?” she said.
“I want that tape—okay?”
She gave one of those sighs that says I’m overworked and underappreciated and you’re an asshole, but she nodded and began to bang on the keys of the little laptop. “This shithole able to receive streaming video?” she said. She apparently meant the VIP lounge they were in.
Dukas wasn’t sure that he even knew what streaming video was, but he said, “Ask Biddler.”
She hit some more keys, and then she was back on the telephone, talking to somebody about al-Gama’at and links to al-Qaida.
Dukas sat down to draft a message to Al Craik in Mombasa, gazing longingly at the empty plate that had held the sweet buns.
Mombasa.
The runways stretched into haze on either side like desert, flat, sterile, the air traffic so light that it was as if no other life existed. Near the hangar door, the Marines had set up a strongpoint of sandbags from which they could watch the approaches and the airport itself. More sandbags were being filled out back. Off to the right, the EM Quonset sat in its own little scrub of green weeds, the nearest they had to an oasis. Just in case they were tempted to get careless, four of the Marines were listening to a radio version of a CNN broadcast on the Cairo bombing.
“Sir?” a voice said at Alan’s elbow. “They got snakes here?”
Jacklin, a twenty-year-old electronics tech. “Some,” Alan said.
“Jeez, I hate snakes.”
Alan debated telling him about mambas, which reared up as high as a man’s chest and could deliver a venom that killed in minutes. Or yellow cobras. Or various others that were, at best, unpleasant. “Just watch where you walk and where you put your hands,” he said. “You’ll be fine.” He was watching another det sailor put something on the ground near the enlisted men’s Quonset.
“What I like on the boat, there’s no snakes.”
“Yeah, but look at how great the food is here, Jacklin.” The sailor over by the Quonset was looking at something in a clump of weeds.
“Oh, yeah. Oh, ye-e-ah! When they start putting pizza in MREs, maybe I’ll start liking them.” Jacklin hesitated. “I heard about a guy opened a box of spare parts, there was a cobra in there.”
A cat came out of the weeds and moved parallel to the sailor, eyes on the ground near his feet. Alan realized that he’d put part of an MRE down there. The cat came close, sat down. The sailor backed off a step. The cat came closer, sat down. Another cat appeared at the edge of the weeds.
Alan nodded. If they’d started to acquire mascots, morale was picking up. Or had been until the news from Cairo had come through. He was waiting for the morning commercial flight from Nairobi to bring some embassy people for a meet. It was odd, loafing here in the haze, but he was wiped, ph
ysically and mentally. Maybe emotionally, too. Of course there was a lot to do, a lot he could have been doing, but he felt wrung out and disassociated, and he thought he had earned a few minutes of doing nothing. Although that was a dangerous idea, that you earned one kind of behavior with another. Like thinking you earned good luck by going through a bad patch, when the truth was you could get whacked again and again and again, and there wouldn’t ever have to be compensation for it. Like Job.
“I’ll bet you have something you’re supposed to be doing,” he said to Jacklin.
“Oh—yes, sir—!” Alan had told the chief to keep everybody busy, even if they had to end up polishing the concrete with their toothbrushes.
So why wasn’t he working? Because he was tired and mentally down. He’d called Rose as soon as he’d got up, waking her in the middle of the Houston night, and it had been good—good to talk family talk, good to hear that husky voice. But when he had hung up, he was still tired and mentally low, and he thought she had sounded down, too, although she wouldn’t admit it to him.
He heard the aircraft then but couldn’t find it in the haze, then spotted it as a silver spark already low and going from his right to left, swinging into its approach. This would be a milk run for the pilot—down from Nairobi in the morning, up again and back the same day. It seemed very peaceful and ordinary and not part of a world in which ships blew up and good men got shot by strangers.
He pulled a handheld from his pocket. “Captain Geelin.”
“Yo.”
“Craik. Nairobi flight’s incoming. Our guests should be here in about fifteen.”
“They’re expected.”
The Marines seemed in better shape than the sailors of the det, at least more alert this morning. Geelin was a good CO, Alan thought, good at pumping his men and good at making them feel they had a purpose. They were all still pissed at leaving their buddies behind on the Harker, but they were sure they would all be back there in a day or two, and it was Geelin’s planning and Geelin’s force of will that gave them that confidence. Alan would have to write him a good fitrep for the time he spent in his command—oddly easy when there was a personal antipathy, as if written praise was more straightforward when there was no liking. Maybe a kind of one-on-you: see how swell I am, even though you think I’m a shit?
“That their plane?” It was Sandy, shading her eyes and squinting. “I hope they brought me some clothes.” She had learned from the Kenyan Navy that her car, with her suitcase in it, had been torched where she had left it outside the fuel depot. Messages had been going back and forth between the det and the embassy and the Jefferson all night. “I asked them to bring me some clothes.” She looked at Alan, her hand still over her eyes, as if he had denied the possibility of anybody’s ever bringing her clothes again.
“Sorry about your car,” he said.
“Yuh.” She shrugged. “It’s insured. I guess Pan-Afric Insurance, Limited, will pay.” She gave an Oh, yeah, like cows give pink Zinfandel kind of laugh. “I asked the Kenyans about interviewing the guy they pulled out of the water. They said, ‘What guy?’ I talked to four different people. Same answer—‘What guy?’ We’re going to have to lean on them.”
The airbus was far across the field, taxiing toward the thin slab that was the terminal, vaguely gray-green in the humid heat. The sun struck gold and silver lights from the aircraft, and they could hear the whine of the engines. At least three people from the embassy were supposed to be on board, and it was they who were supposed to be bringing the Legat her clothes. Not a very high item on their list of priorities, Alan thought—or maybe it was. Maybe keeping a crucial member of the staff in clean clothes was right up there with defending America.
“I told them to bring my blue jeans,” she said.
“Don’t wear them off the det space.” He looked at her. “Islamic sensibilities. They don’t like—”
“For God’s sake! I’ve lived here for eighteen months!” She wrapped her arms around herself and stepped back into the shade. “I’m sick of Islamic sensibilities.”
Somebody came striding toward them through the gloom of the hangar, and Alan squinted sun-dazzled eyes to make out Cohen, who looked serious and insecure. When he saw Alan looking at him, he bobbed his head and came faster. “Message from the boat,” he said when he got close. “Somebody named Dukas sent you a Most Urgent.” He handed Alan the message.
“He’s the head of the NCIS team that’s due in tonight. Where the hell is he?—London.” Alan read: early reports were that an AID office had been the target in Cairo; Washington had word that a car bomb had gone off at the side of the building, blowing out three floors and the building across the side street. No casualty figures yet, but Cairo police were already reporting that the nearest hospital was overflowing with people who had glass injuries and had been able to walk there. Dukas was sending Dick Triffler, already in Cairo, to check it out.
Alan looked at Sandy. “Why would anybody hit an AID office?”
She shrugged. “Seen as very aggressive ‘Big America’ presence. Maybe resentment because they think it’s connected with the World Bank or the WTO—people believe all kinds of shit in this part of the world.”
“You don’t think much of this part of the world.”
“Do you?” She squinted off into the haze, played with her hair. “I’m not judgmental. I just get tired of all their shit.”
It was the third time he had heard her use the word “shit” that morning, and he couldn’t remember her using it or any other strong word the day before, when things were tougher. Stress? Aftershock? “Maybe you know them better than I do,” he said, trying to be tactful. He was reaching for his cell phone.
“Oh, Christ, don’t patronize me.” She walked away into the cool of the hangar. So much for tact.
Cohen, who had been hanging around, started to move away, and Alan grabbed his arm. “Pass the word to the Harker that we’re upping security because of Cairo. They’ll probably have it from the boat, but make sure. They should be extra alert. Captain Geelin will probably have something to say to his gunny on board, too.”
Cohen hesitated. “What should we expect here?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you.”
“I’ll be happier when those other gyrenes get here.”
“Maybe.”
“Memorial service for Craw has been set for 1700. Should we cancel it?”
They were walking into the hangar together, heading for the office. The space where the aircraft had been was empty, making the place seem even bigger. The plane would be loading now in Nairobi.
“The memorial service is a good idea. Keep it.”
He already had one of the intel specialists checking Egyptian terrorism and possible links to Mombasa. It seemed far-fetched, the two countries not contiguous, their branches of Islam different, their faces turned in different directions. Like most other intelligence professionals, he resisted the idea of highly organized terrorist networks that spanned national boundaries and were equally effective in very different cultures. It was one thing to speak Egyptian Arabic and work in a nation where a strong Islamic counterculture had long waged a war against the government, quite another to speak Swahili and work in a nation where the Islamic political movement was mostly nonviolent and legal. And yet, intel people also knew that when two terrorist events happened closely in time, they were almost certainly connected. And a third might follow.
What would Harry O’Neill say now?
“Get to CIC on the boat and ask them to secure-fax us everything they’ve got on Egyptian terrorist groups.” That was merely insurance, however; he knew pretty well what the boat would have: al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya, which had attacked tourists and the Egyptian government and which had an external wing, but which had been quiet for more than a year; al-Jihad, a specialist in high-level assassination, including Anwar Sadat, with a branch in Afghanistan connected to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida; various splinters of the Palestinian groups, but their real
interest was Gaza. Many of them had signed on to bin Laden’s hatred of Americans. But why now? And why one day after an attack in Mombasa, where these groups had never operated?
He found Sandy at the far end of the hangar, sitting in one of the chairs of the circle they had made last night. She looked miserable, and he thought that she, too, would benefit from something to do. “You got any contacts in Kenyan military intelligence?” he said.
“I’m more into police. But it slops over—you know.”
“How about you try to find what they’ve got on connections with Egypt? Anything—anything at all. Money, intercepts, rumor—what the hell.”
She stared at her feet, which were cleaner this morning. “They’re all Muslims,” she said.
“We need connections. How about it?”
She heaved herself up. “Okay,” she said in a voice that suggested that hope was a fantasy. She started to slouch off, then turned back to him with her hand in her hair. “If you really want to work with people I trust, let’s go to the Kenya Wildlife Service.”
“They wouldn’t have much on terrorism, would they?”
She shrugged. “They’re their own country. They don’t trust the military, they don’t trust the cops, they don’t trust the crooks around the president—and they’re right.”
“So try them.”
She scowled at him as if she was going to say something else, then turned and wandered away, playing with her hair. She seemed to him a different woman this morning. Tough to be married to, if so.
London.
Dukas had gathered his team in front of Geraldine’s laptop. People were slouching in easy chairs as if they’d been dropped on them from a height. Jet lag was not being kind.
“Okay, look and listen, please. What we’re going to see is the unedited tape of the first stuff on the Mombasa bombing. This is what you saw on CNN and elsewhere. Geraldine?”
She hit a key, and the screen changed color. The television material came up abruptly and, without introduction or editing, looked jerky and disconnected. Everybody leaned closer, because the small screen was hard on detail.
