Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  There was no voice-over on the early shots, but there seemed to be sound, even at one point somebody’s breathing. The first shot showed a metal gate with coiled razor wire along the top, then, abruptly, a street lined with palms, young men moving on it apparently aimlessly. Two or three looked at the camera. A voice could be heard saying something; Dukas thought he heard “. . . non plus.”

  Establishing shots.

  “Some riot,” Hahn muttered.

  Then the gate appeared again, growing jerkily closer, apparently as the cameraman moved toward it. The French-accented voice that Dukas remembered said something like “venez—venez—vite, vite—pas encore—” Dukas thought he could see a ship’s superstructure on the other side of the gate—had he? No time; another change without transition, and they were apparently on a dock, looking at the open water between it and an adjacent dock. There was a crane. The camera swung left and showed a large, gray ship almost bow-on.

  “That the Harker?”

  “Inutile,” the French voice said on the tape.

  More cranes, buildings glimpsed behind them. A slow pan to the right, movement out on the water, the end of the next pier, a small freighter tied up, another small ship—

  Complete change—buildings, the tops of palms, smoke at a distance. Then a gate, maybe the same gate as before. Seen now from its other side? The voice was muttering on the tape but it was unclear, certainly not meant for broadcast. Dukas could make out none of it.

  And then the scene they had looked at again and again on television, this time with voice-over, ending with Alan Craik hurrying toward the camera and turning, injured hand out.

  The screen went blank.

  “Show it again.”

  They went through it a second time. Then again. People talked over it now. Mendelsohn, whose French was pretty good, translated what he could. “ ‘Useless’ is what he said when it showed the Harker. ‘Inutile’ means ‘useless.’ ”

  “Why the fuck would he say that? What’s useless about a ship?”

  “Maybe he was looking for shots of the riot. A ship would be useless if you wanted shots of the riot.”

  But Dukas was thinking that if the guy had wanted shots of a riot, he wouldn’t be here in the docks. He’d be out in the street, where that early shot had been filmed. On the other hand, a shot of the Harker would be useless, maybe, if you knew it was going to be blown up, because it would tell too much about what you knew. Was that just too far out?

  “Show it again,” he said.

  This time he focused on only the shot with the Harker, but he didn’t look at the ship that was going to be blown up. He looked at the right side of the screen, the open water next to the Harker. It widened as the camera swung right—movement on the water, muffled sound—

  “Hold it!”

  Freeze-frame didn’t work on a computer, but Geraldine managed to back up and stop, which gave them a blurry approximation. Dukas pointed at the pale smudge where the movement was. “What is it? Anybody see it well enough to know?”

  They all strained to see. Geraldine said, “Well, it’s on the water. It’s a boat.”

  “Could be a bird,” Hahn muttered.

  Dukas told her to run it again. Was it a boat? He listened to the muffled sound. “Turn it up and run it again.” He watched the camera start to pan, saw the movement on the water, heard a chuffing sound like, perhaps, wind hitting the mike, and the voice, “—non, non—”

  They shoot the Harker, and the camera pans, and it sees the boat or whatever, and the French guy says, “No, no.”

  And at that point, the pan had stopped.

  They looked at it again, and this time it registered on Dukas that the final sequences, those that included Al Craik, had started much farther away from the Harker than the pan with the movement on the water. At the very first, the camera had started shooting outside the gate; then it had come inside the gate, then had moved closer to the dock where the Harker was moored. And then it had gone all the way outside the gate again. But between the last two sequences, somebody had bombed the Harker.

  “Get somebody in D.C. to analyze the tape,” Dukas told Geraldine Pastner. “I want to know what was moving on the water. And I want to know every word that sonofabitch said.”

  Geraldine looked at him with raised eyebrows and a small look of fake surprise. “ ‘Sonofabitch’?”

  “Yeah, sonofabitch, as in he knew exactly what was going to happen. That sonofabitch.”

  Ten minutes later, with phones ringing and voices filling the space as if it was a telemarketers’ boiler room, Dukas was in the midst of chewing something the English thought was an edible bun when his cell phone went off and, mouth full, he pulled it out and shouted “Dukas!”—which came out as a kind of seal’s mating cry because of the bun.

  “Mister Dukas?”

  “Yeah, oh, hi, yeah, Leslie—” He swallowed. He didn’t want to talk to his barely postadolescent assistant. He suspected he’d jumped at the chance to leave Washington partly to get away from her. He swallowed again. “Yes, Leslie, what?”

  “There’s been a bomb in Cairo.”

  “I already heard.”

  “I worried about you.”

  “Leslie, I’m in London. Cairo’s in Egypt.”

  “Even so.” She waited. Was he supposed to say something? He didn’t. She said, “I want you to be very careful.”

  “That’s it? You called me to tell me to be careful? Leslie, do you know how busy I am?”

  “Now you’re mad at me, aren’t you.”

  Dukas took a deep breath. “Leslie, what time is it there?”

  “About three-fifteen.”

  She meant three-fifteen in the morning. “Leslie, go back to bed.”

  “I’m in bed. I can’t sleep. I’m worried about you.”

  Dukas told her to take two aspirin and not to call him again unless there was something important. She said that this was important. Dukas restrained himself and said it was nice of her to worry and everything was fine, good-bye, click, and he turned his cell phone off because he was sure she’d call right back. What’s the matter with her? he asked himself. She’s usually such a smart kid.

  Dukas had loved a number of women who hadn’t loved him back. He’d never experienced things the other way around.

  Cairo.

  NCIS Special Agent Dick Triffler was tall and slender and more medium-brown than black. He tended toward the sartorially elegant, usually wore expensive suits and heavy silk ties when the climate cooperated. Cairo had frustrated him at first with its heat, which was oppressive even for a Washingtonian, but he had bought a couple of locally made shirts and a local jacket, the shirts like tissue and the jacket a nubby silk so fine it could have been used for a scarf, and in these he was almost comfortable and certainly splendid. The concierge of the first-class hotel where the Bright Star crew were housed approved: the day that Triffler had first appeared in his new clothes, the concierge—a slim, silver-haired, olive-skinned Egyptian who spoke flawless English, French, and Arabic—said “Ah-h-h!” the equivalent of a standing ovation.

  Now, however, Triffler was crossing Cairo in a brutal car that needed a right front shock absorber and had no air-conditioning, and he knew he should have worn short sleeves and no tie and no silk jacket. Sweat was pouring from him and from the Egyptian cop who sat next to him, radiating heat as if he had just been fired up and turned on full. The cop’s name was Sergeant al-Fawzi-al-Mubarak, but he had said, “Call me Ali,” in a tone that suggested that Ali was not his real name but that he had learned from long experience that “Ali” was all Americans could manage.

  Triffler had decided to call him “Sergeant.”

  Right now, he wanted to say, “Sergeant, move way over and stop metabolizing, would you?” but of course you didn’t say anything like that to an ally whose cooperation would be vital if they in fact found anything at the apartment they were headed for. Indeed, the sergeant was there only because Triffler had already made conn
ections at a fairly high level through Bright Star. As soon as Dukas had rung off from London, he had made three phone calls, standing in nothing but a pair of lime-green jockey shorts with dancing female nudes on them. The first, to a biggie in the military police, had given the number of a somebody in the Cairo police, and that call had given him the sergeant and the plainclothes car and the driver.

  And the heat, and his wilting, wonderful jacket and shirt.

  “We are there,” the sergeant said. He waved a large, glistening hand at the side of the street. Triffler was momentarily disoriented: where was there? Then he remembered: there would be the apartment of an American woman named Alice Dempsey, who hadn’t reported for work that morning at the AID office.

  Just as Dukas had said.

  Triffler ducked his head and twisted his neck and looked up. The building had been put up under the French or British and was falling down in its own good time. Monumental columns rose on each side of an arched doorway; above it, pediments and pilasters and deep window bays rose up out of sight. It had once been very grand, indeed.

  The driver had scuttled around and was holding the door open. He, too, was a cop, but a small, weasely one. Packing, however, like the sergeant; Triffler could see the bulges under their open-necked shirts. He, of course, was unarmed. (The Egyptians loved the Americans like brothers, but they certainly didn’t want them going about with guns, for God’s sake.)

  On the sidewalk, Triffler stood half a head taller than the sergeant and six inches more than that above the driver. The sergeant, however, made up for the difference in bulk; he was a wide man, and his short haircut and no-bullshit expression made him look very tough. Now he said something to the driver, who scuttled back behind the wheel. “We go in,” the sergeant said.

  “Let’s set some ground rules first.” Triffler looked into the man’s eyes. Nothing came back out. “Rules of engagement? You know—how we’re going to conduct ourselves?”

  “You want to find woman.”

  “Right. But we’re not going to bust in—you know, go in big? Noisy? No noise, no guns. We knock.” He made a knocking motion. For some reason, the sergeant laughed. “This is investigative,” Triffler said.

  “Woman does not go work, bomb goes off, you investigate.”

  “Right.”

  The sergeant reached under his shirt and tugged his pants upward. The gesture was aggressive and at the same time cautious, as if he was reining himself in. “Your investigation,” he said. “Something wrong, it is Cairo case.”

  “Absolutely. I just want to talk to her. Okay?”

  “Okay-okay.” He barked more Arabic at the driver, who slunk down in the seat like a dog who has been scolded. The sergeant led Triffler through the arched doorway, whose huge wooden doors were propped permanently open by wooden poles as big around as sewer pipes. Inside, there was a courtyard, with balconies rising on three sides; small cars had been jammed in so tightly that Triffler didn’t see how the drivers got in and out. An elderly woman was screaming at a young man who was squeezing himself into one of them while two other men waited, and Triffler saw the system: you parked your car, then other people parked all around you, and then when you wanted your car, the old woman screamed until the other cars were moved.

  “Is she the concierge?” he said.

  The sergeant used an Arabic word, then nodded at a cubbyhole behind the door. No doubt the old woman’s lair.

  “Ask her if Miss Dempsey is in.”

  The sergeant flashed a badge and said something; the old woman stopped screaming and looked terrified; the young man shot the car between Triffler and the sergeant, and the other men got in their cars and gunned the engines. The badge had made everybody in a hurry to be someplace else.

  “She say, American woman upstairs.” His big face looked as if it had been oiled; as Triffler watched, a drop of sweat fell from the sergeant’s nose.

  “Ask her if she has a car here.”

  More talk, and the old woman pointed at a green Fiat in the middle of the pack. Triffler squeezed himself between the cars, sucking in his gut and trying to keep his elegance unsmirched—hopeless with the dust of the streets on every surface. He scraped his thighs, shifted, and scraped his butt; he lifted the skirts of his jacket and felt his cordovan loafers lose their shine on a tire. When he got to the car, there was nothing to do but bend down and look in, trying to penetrate the dirt of the windshield so he could see—what? Nothing. The interior of a small, messy car. With what was perhaps a laptop on the back seat under a lot of paper folders.

  Out of the tangle, Triffler dusted his trousers and wiped his loafers with a tissue and inspected his jacket for dirt or, horrible to think about, oil stains. The sergeant looked disgusted.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Triffler said. “Does the old lady have keys?”

  More Arabic, then a yes.

  “Bring her along, please.”

  There was an elevator that had perhaps been the wonder of the city in 1898; now it made a clanking overhead that suggested bad things to come, perhaps on this very trip. The ride up two stories seemed interminable, but it gave Triffler time to reflect that it would be quicker to take the stairs, even in the heat, and if you wanted to cover exits from the woman’s apartment, you’d need at least four people, because he could see two sets of stairs through the elevator’s porthole, and he was sure there was at least one back stair somewhere, because when this place was put up, everybody who had lived here had had servants.

  “So,” the sergeant said.

  “Right.” Triffler got out and stood aside for the old woman, who, in response, cowered at the back of the elevator. The sergeant reached in and yanked her out. She began to weep.

  “That wasn’t necessary,” Triffler said.

  The sergeant looked at him as if necessity was hardly a relevant concept. He gave the old woman a shove and she plodded along the balcony to their right, weeping and going through her keys as if they were a rosary. She came to a stop outside a tall doorway, holding up a key as if it would ward off the sergeant’s evil spirit. Taking Triffler—probably correctly—for the kinder of the two, she jerked her head toward the door and then bobbed the key up and down.

  The sergeant reached for the keys, but Triffler put out his hand to stop him, and he started to say “I’m going to knock,” getting as far as “I’m going—” when a small-caliber gunshot popped and a woman screamed inside.

  The sergeant wrenched the bundle of keys from the old woman’s hand; she retreated, holding the hand and bawling; Triffler leaned his ear against the door, and the door swung a few inches open and then stopped on a high place in the floor. Then things happened very fast, with Triffler’s brain slowing them down for later sorting: the scar on the doorjamb where the lock had been forced; the semicircle on the flooring where the door had dragged an image of its opening and closing; the feeling of a blow on his shoulder as the sergeant pushed him in and down.

  Triffler pushed the door hard and it swung open and he stumbled two steps into the interior, sensing high ceilings and ornate molding, another door open on the right, and the glare of high windows straight ahead, against which were the silhouettes of two figures. He held out a hand, something in him meaning to make the habitual apology for bursting in; something American and coplike wanting to forestall complaint, lawsuit; something warning him that he had no warrant.

  One silhouette was female. She was falling backward.

  The other silhouette was male. Triffler understood that the silhouette was turning, turning toward him, the meaning unclear, and then he saw between the two figures the hand and the gun, and he knew that the silhouette was going to shoot him.

  Triffler hit the floor and the gun spat, and behind him another gun roared, a big caliber, shot after shot. Triffler’s face was in a carpet, his fingers clawing at it, waiting for a shot in the top of the head or the back, one shooter or the other sure to get him, and then the shooting stopped and he rolled to the side and, coming up against th
e legs of a table, raised his head.

  The sergeant was pulling a backup gun from an ankle holster, his face transfigured by an expression of ecstatic concentration. His off hand held a huge automatic.

  Triffler swiveled his eyes and saw only the shot-out windows and the glare; bringing his gaze down, he saw a dead man and, behind him and to the right, a dead woman.

  “Oh, shit,” he muttered. He got to his feet, motioning to the sergeant to back off. “It’s over, it’s over—” The sergeant pushed past him and opened the door on the right in a combat stance and went through. His footsteps, and then Triffler heard another door open in there.

  The man on the floor had been killed several times over. He had been hit at least four times, center-of-body hits that had blown blood and tissue over the floor and walls behind him. Triffler’s eyes, accustoming themselves to the indoor light, saw the sweep of red, and he smelled the stink of it. He blew out his breath, shook his head. “Oh, boy,” he said. He looked down at the woman, who, thank God, didn’t seem to have any big bullet holes in her, only one small one where her heart was, which had penetrated a pale blue blouse and a pink brassiere and left black powder residue and burns. The shooter had been holding her, he guessed, maybe by an upper arm or a wrist, and he had put the gun right against her breast and fired, and when Triffler had fallen into the room he had still been holding her.

  He felt for a pulse in her throat and got nothing. “Oh, boy.”

  The sergeant passed behind him going the other way and Triffler heard another door open.

  He had blood on the soles of his loafers now, he knew, and he knelt beside the dead man and got blood on the knee of his linen trousers. He felt in what was left of the man’s pockets and came up with a bloody nylon wallet that was more like a card case, hardly big enough for money, but it held plastic cards and what he took to be a driver’s license and folded papers. By the time he had that figured out, the sergeant was back, his reloaded cannon again stored in his cross-draw holster. He knelt by Triffler and started wiggling the backup gun into the ankle holster.