Mohammed took another bite as he considered what he was about to say. “I must ask you a personal question, my brother—”
“You want to know if I am devout? Am I your brother? Do I serve the Prophet?”
Mohammed should have realized he was not the first person to come here like this—scattered and searching. He answered Hassan’s question with silence.
“You offer me all you have and, if that is short, hope to pay for the rest with my devotion to faith,” Hassan said. “I will be frank. It is not my preferred way of doing business. I have a family, including my blessed grandfather, and I am their sole provider. If you tell me something and I can get more compensation from some other party I will take it.”
Mohammed stopped chewing. He resisted the urge to spit out the bread; that would cross a line from rejecting the man’s hospitality to insult. If he could not find an ally in Hassan, neither did he want an enemy. He placed the rest of the bread back on the plate and pushed the chair back.
“Thank you, Hassan, for your gracious welcome,” Mohammed said and rose.
Hassan remained seated. He looked at the cash as Mohammed reached for it. “Were you naive enough to think a man of faith could be found on the waterfront? You saw those chairs.” He jerked his head toward the back of the room. “We sell young girls to the highest bidders, my brother.”
Mohammed looked at him with disapproval. “I do not have young girls in my van.”
“I did not think you did. You have no scratch marks. But I will make you a deal, Mohammed.”
Mohammed hesitated.
“Leave the cash and tell me your proposition. If I do not feel I can help you, this will buy my silence. You may take your van and go. You have my vow. Be aware, Mohammed, that unless you are very, very fortunate, you will face this same question from whoever you approach. Men of faith, purely of faith, do not work where I do, as I do. And you dare not go to a mosque, where you will be asked about your own beliefs and, more likely than not, you will find you are in the house of the wrong sect . . . for there are many here.” Hassan smiled. “I like you. That advice is free.”
Mohammed considered this . . . not that he had a choice. Everything in his world, in this world, was like a bazaar. Haggling for goods, services, or lives was the norm. Following their victim to Rabat had been no different: it was pay as you go for extra eyes and ears so he would not see them everywhere he went.
Mohammed said, “I have a portable nuclear device in the van. It is shielded now but it is so hot it killed my companion in minutes. I wish to find someone who can complete the wiring so I can use it to attack the enemies of Islam.”
Hassan did not show surprise often, but he showed it now.
“This—thing. It is from here?” Hassan asked.
“Not originally, but this is where I found it.”
“Found?”
“Stolen. By accident. An honor killing—an Iranian who killed my brother in Yemen.”
“Last night?” Hassan asked. He would have heard about it otherwise.
“Yes.”
“Where is your companion now?”
“In a grave in the sands,” Mohammed said. “By the boats.”
“He will be found, eventually. You—”
“Stripped him. He has no identification. He has no record, so his fingerprints will be of no value.”
“Did you enter this country legally?”
“Yes, but with counterfeit papers,” Mohammed said.
“His face?”
“I—I made sure he will not be identified by sight.”
Hassan nodded. He had wondered where the blood on the man’s shirt had come from. The poor fellow probably didn’t realize it was there. “The Iranian was passing through?”
“Yes.”
That meant other Iranians would be looking for the device, and very soon. There was no science in Hassan’s choices: he acted by his gut. What instinct told him now tore him in two. Any man who helped in this project would be hunted by Americans, Europeans, and Israelis. If he were known to be a participant, then one day he would be found and killed. Possibly with his family. On the other side of the argument: what would his father and the rest of the group do if God had dropped this man at their door? Hassan was not religious enough or old enough to be overly concerned about Paradise just yet. But to be guaranteed an eternal place by the side of God—that was not unattractive.
My life is about risk-taking, he thought. How is this any different?
And there was a third part of the equation, though it only surfaced when he had weighed the other two: vanity. To have a hand in something of this magnitude would make Hassan a legend among the few people in whom he could confide. There were not many, since other smugglers would sell him out as quickly as he would sell them. But his father and grandfather, his wife and, one day, his children—he would never earn that kind of stature doing what he did day after day.
He thought for a moment more. Those were the abstract aspects of the problem. There was a practical side as well: how to do what needed to be done.
“I will help you,” Hassan said. “But I want a promise from you first.”
“Anything.”
“If you are discovered, you will not be taken alive,” Hassan told him. “You will not speak of my involvement. Not even to the people to whom I send you.”
“I swear it.”
Hassan picked up the pile of cash and selected a dozen 100,000-rial notes, which he stuffed in a front pocket of his shirt. Each was worth roughly ten dollars U.S. He pushed the rest of the stack back to Mohammed. “You will need this along the way.”
Mohammed smiled and bowed gratefully.
“Do you have a cell phone?” Hassan asked.
“I do.”
“Passport?”
“Yes.”
“Firearm?”
“I would not travel without one.”
Hassan nodded his approval with great seriousness.
“You are to get on the Maghreb Highway and stay on it,” Hassan told him. “Wait for my call. I will tell you what the situation is here and whether you need to stop along the way. When I give you your final instructions, you will crush the cell phone under your tires and throw the pieces into any body of water you pass.”
“I understand,” Mohammed said. “Is there anything you can tell me about where I am going?”
“All I can tell you,” the man said, “is you are going to meet a well-connected professor. I am sure he will help you.”
ROTA, SPAIN
Kealey woke when he felt the plane begin its descent. Rayhan was asleep beside him. He gave her a gentle shake.
“I’m awake,” she said.
He waited a moment with a crooked little smile. She fell asleep again. He shook her a little harder.
“I’m awake,” she repeated. This time she opened her eyes.
Kealey moved a little closer and looked at her. “Your lips are dry, and your voice isn’t quite connected to your brain,” he said. “What did you take?
She didn’t answer.
“I asked you something, Rayhan.”
“Ambien,” she said as she wriggled semi-upright in her sling.
“Dumb,” he said bluntly. “Are you going to be alert? You need coffee?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I wouldn’t have been if I couldn’t sleep. Don’t worry. I used to do this when I was a kid. My mother gave me Valium. Otherwise, I could never have rested in the bomb shelters.”
Kealey did worry, though he let it rest. It was one thing to risk his life on a partner, which is why he didn’t like having them. It was something else to risk his life—along with the security of the nation—on a partner with a drug hangover. The only drug he had ever carried into the field was a cyanide capsule, and then only in places like Chechnya and Iraq, where capture meant torture and beheading with a knife.
A Petty Officer First Class came aboard to collect Kealey and Rayhan. The two got a big “good-bye” from Rep
resentative Thomson as they deplaned.
“Stay safe, you two, and look me up in D.C.,” Thomson said.
Kealey did not think the invitation was for him and hoped their paths did not cross. He did not want to be reminded that people like this were deciding the policy he had to execute.
The joint U.S.-Spanish Color Guard aboard Naval Station, Rota—NAVSTA Rota—covers six thousand acres on the north shore of Cádiz, the Gateway to the Mediterranean. It was established in 1953 by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who was looking to shore up relations with the United States. The United States Navy is responsible for the upkeep of the 670-acre airfield, the trio of piers and hundreds of military structures, and over eight hundred homes for the soldiers.
The unobstructed sunlight was a shock to Kealey and his companion as they emerged before the jeeps and before the Congressmen. They were taken by the Petty Officer First Class to a waiting Humvee. Just before the seaman deleted them, Kealey caught their photographs on the dashboard display.
The man introduced himself. He was Johannes Megapolensis, which the young man spoke proudly and clearly as the Humvee hummed and he drove them across the six-thousand-acre base toward one of the piers. The red-tile roofs and low white buildings were pure Mediterranean, a contrast to the purely functional bases Kealey was used to. The United States had been here for sixty years, since 1953—it was an ideal stopping-off point halfway to the Middle East, the Suez Canal and oil shipments, and Southwest Asia. For Spain, it was a boon to the local economies.
When they reached the pier, a sleek, twenty-seven-foot powerboat was waiting for them. It had a canvas canopy, a food locker, and a radio.
“Do you know how to run ’er, sir?” Megapolensis asked.
“Twin 250 HP Yamahas? No kicker engine?”
Megapolensis smiled. “No, sir. If you’d care to wait we could rig one—”
“No thanks. I used to troll for steelheads with an 8 HP. How many gas tanks?”
“Three, sir. Two hundred gallons per. Will that do?
“That’ll do,” Kealey said appreciatively. The boat wouldn’t get the best mileage on the open sea, but the extra tanks more than compensated—and, better, they would provide extra weight and greater stability. Rayhan would probably appreciate that. She still looked a little dazed. And if she weren’t used to it, knocking around at sea was not like bumping up and down on an ATV.
“There are requested add-ons—binoculars, some fishing gear onboard, and some sandwiches in the locker in case you don’t have time to fish,” Megapolensis said. “If I might ask, sir, where did you fish? Out here, it’s always nice to hear stories from home.”
“Maine,” Kealey said as he stepped in and offered his hand to Rayhan. Megapolensis was already putting her overnighter onboard. “I had a house there for a while. Really rustic.”
“I love that. I’m from Vermont,” the enlisted man said with a longing look atop a big smile. “Grew up on Lake Champlain.”
“Ever see the monster?”
“No, sir. I don’t believe in that sort of thing.”
Kealey smiled as the sailor handed him a pair of Navy-issue sunglasses. “Monsters exist,” Kealey assured him as they untied the boat from the pier.
“The kind with flippers and fangs, sir?”
“Worse,” Kealey said. “The kind with smiles and power.”
The young man offered a confused salute as Kealey started the engines. Rayhan was familiarizing herself with the GPS.
“We good?” he asked her.
“The boat appears to be,” she said. “Are we?”
“I sure hope so.” It wasn’t a commitment, but then she didn’t deserve one. Kealey was angry, but he would have a few hours of sea air to rid himself of that and for her to clear her head.
“There’s an iPod in the music bay,” she said. “Should we leave it?”
“Yeah. And it isn’t an iPod. It’s a TAC-X receiver. If Clarke needs to send us maps, dossiers, or anything else, he’ll do it there. If you hear a ping, check under “Kealey Playlist.” The device wipes its memory every ten minutes except for Vladimir Horowitz playing Chopin, Eugene Ormandy performing Tchaikovsky, and Arthur Fiedler whipping up the best of John Philip Sousa.”
“How do you know what’s on it?”
“Standard playlist,” Kealey said. “One way to know if someone’s replaced it.”
“Why not just send the maps to your cell phone?”
Kealey held up a finger while he ran a radio check. He would remain in contact with Rota until they reached Africa. Then he was on his own. As he noted the location of the fire extinguisher and emergency flares, he answered Rayhan’s question.
“The general’s going to have his eyes on both devices,” Kealey said. “They will be on me at all times. An iPod may get left behind. If we are separated, he’ll assume that something is wrong.”
“But we’re the only ones in the field,” she said. “If something goes wrong, how will that help us?”
“It won’t,” Kealey said. “It’ll tell him our mission is in jeopardy and he should go to Plan B, whatever that might be. They’re probably figuring that one out now.” The operative smiled appreciatively. “The general’s philosophy is ‘Do something now.’ He likes to develop his available pieces ASAP. That’s us. There’s nothing sentimental about him, not when he’s on the job.”
Rayhan was wearing the same fall coat she’d been wearing when they went to Valley Stream. Kealey yanked a black sweater from his grip, slipped into it, then pulled from the pier. He eased skillfully into the blindingly bright water. The boat had four seats, two of them facing back. That was where the sportfishermen sat. Rayhan was in the one behind Kealey, right beside the low railing. The canopy protected her from the sun but not from the motion of the vessel. Though Kealey was traveling at the maximum speed of forty-five knots, the skimming action was mitigated by the added fuel weight. The powerboat cut through the water rather than rode up and slapped down.
“I’m sorry about the Ambien,” she said, turning her head back and shouting to be heard over the sound of water and twin Yamahas. “I should have asked.”
Kealey nodded. He was angrier than before. Now that they were boots-on-the-ground, he found that he wasn’t willing to rely on her as completely as he needed to. That was the kind of quirk that would have been knocked out of a person during training. You learned to sleep hard and fast. During survival runs in the Rockies—which was where a lot of the special forces teams going to Afghanistan did their drilling, seven thousand feet up—you knew that helicopters were going to be looking for you in two-hour cycles. That gave you exactly one hundred and twenty minutes to rest between flyovers. If you didn’t seize that time, you didn’t sleep. If you didn’t sleep, your chances of falling from a slope and dragging your companions with you, of dooming the mission, increased.
“Going forward, you don’t do anything without being told,” Kealey said. “And when you are told something, you do it. I need your eyes and ears and brain, and I need them at one hundred percent. Everything we do is to preserve the only Arabic speaker and scientist on this mission. Understood?”
“I understand,” she said, then turned aft again.
Kealey knew that no one liked being upbraided. She probably felt safe because he had gotten chummy with the enlisted man.
She was wrong.
“I need you to watch the iPod,” Kealey said.
Rayhan used the back of the seats to support herself as she swung around. She fell into the seat without complaint. He would have told her to sit there from the start if he had known she wouldn’t get seasick. Now, he had no choice.
“What am I looking for?” she asked, turning it on.
“It’s a four-hour trip to Rabat. Clarke’s eyes in the sky are watching the area around the motel where the Iranian was killed. The satellite feed is in my file. Assuming Tehran has someone in the area now, that’s where they’ll go for starters. There’s also—”
“I see it,�
�� she said. “A crawl of radiation levels. How—?”
“A plane from Rota fired a DART into the motel roof two hours ago,” Kealey said. “A Direct Access Radiation Test. Which also happens to be a dart. What does the data tell you?”
“It’s a hot spot but falling,” she said. “Someone most likely opened the container and shut it quickly.”
“After taking a lethal dose?”
“Without a doubt,” she said. “My God, if this is the residue—it was a hell of a burst. The individual wouldn’t have survived an hour.”
“So we’re looking at a pair or more of perps or a device that’s still in Rabat or both.”
“I’m betting on both,” Rayhan said.
“Why?”
“Because there’s a secondary reading coming from the northeast,” she said. “Very faint but it has the same—let’s call it a fingerprint. Nothing close to lethal but elevated from ambient radiation.”
Kealey did a pullback on the GPS map. He saw the river. It wasn’t a real-time image, so he couldn’t tell whether there was anything of interest on it. He took his cell phone from his belt and called Clarke at home.
“Did I wake you?” Kealey asked.
“I wish you had. Where are you?”
“On the Mediterranean, where it’s sunny with a hint of fallout.”
“Too tired to find that funny. Are you saying there’s a trail?”
Kealey explained the twin radiation readings, then asked him to have his INTERPOL connection, Mostpha Bensami, get someone to follow the radiation trail from the motel to wherever it leads.
“Open or not?”
“Open,” Kealey said. “We might as well see if anyone else is watching.”
“You got it,” Clarke told him.
Kealey hung up.
“May I ask—?” Rayhan said.
“About open or not?” Kealey said.
She nodded.
“Do we want a theoretical Iranian operative to see what’s being done,” Kealey said. “The answer is yes.”
“Why?”
“A twofer,” Kealey said. “Hopefully, we find the killer and the device. Mr. Bensami or whoever he sends will be waiting and watching. With luck, we may also get ourselves an Iranian agent.”
The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller Page 15
