by Larry Bond
“I’m sorry, sir—”
“Let me look,” said Rostislawitch, starting past the desk.
“You’re not allowed back here,” said the man, putting out his hand to stop him.
“I just want to look for my bag. It’s very important. It’s very—it’s critical.”
Rostislawitch pushed past the man and turned the corner into the room with the luggage. There were rows of lockers, and larger bags collected along the wall. The door to the locker where his bag had been was open. He put his hand inside, even though he could easily see that it was empty. He ran his fingers around the space, rattling the side of the empty box.
Rostislawitch grabbed at the locker doors near it, but they were all locked. Spotting the bags against the wall, he slid down to his knees near one that looked like his. Pulling it out, he laid it on the floor and unzipped it—nothing but clothes.
“You’re not allowed here,” said a policeman behind him.
“I’ve lost my luggage. It’s very important that I get it back,” said Rostislawitch in Russian.
The policeman did not understand. “Can you speak English?” he asked.
“English, yes. I’ve lost my bag. I need it.”
“This may be true, but you’re not allowed here,” said the cop.
“Please. I have to find my bag.”
Rostislawitch grabbed another case. It didn’t look that much like his, but he had to do something—he had to find his bag.
The policeman took his shoulder. “You are not allowed here. Come.”
“My bag. There must have been a mistake.”
The clerk came over with his key and began opening the lockers nearby. Rostislawitch watched, trembling. None of the suitcases nearby looked like his.
“I need my bag,” he said, when the clerk held out his hands, indicating he had no idea where it had gone.
“You can file a claim,” said the policeman.
“It must be here.”
The cop took hold of Rostislawitch’s arm. Two more police officers had appeared at the doorway.
“I’m being very patient,” said the policeman in Italian. “Because I know what it is like to lose a bag. But if it’s lost, it’s lost. Come on now.”
Rostislawitch couldn’t think. He only half-understood what the policeman had said, but the prods were emphatic, and he started to go out. Then he stopped, looked back, started again. He was torn between rage and logic—the bag must be here.
“Come on, sir,” said another policeman. “Come on.”
The scientist walked out of the room, his head pounding. The clerk shoved some papers in his hand.
“Make the report, sir,” said the man. “Here is a pen. Just make the report. If the luggage turns up—sometimes this happens—we will be able to give it to you. If not, a claim. They are good about paying.”
“You all right?” asked the policeman who’d been with him in the room. He was speaking English again; Rostislawitch could understand every word.
“I need a drink of water,” said the scientist.
“There’s a store right over there.”
“Yes.”
Rostislawitch started away. The FSB she-wolf must have taken the bag. She’d probably followed him here from Moscow.
What was he going to do?
He walked into the store and bought a bottle of water.
He could use something much stronger.
A few yards from the water store, Ferguson sat head down on the floor, watching as Rostislawitch sorted through his change. Ferguson rocked forward, then ambled in Rostislawitch’s direction.
“I wonder if you have a coin for a smoke?” he asked in Italian.
Rostislawitch thought the disheveled man looked vaguely familiar but couldn’t place him. He told him in Russian to get lost.
“You’re Russian?” said Ferguson, answering in Russian as well. He pulled his head back, as if he didn’t trust the man, then looked all around the station, as if they might be overheard.
“You understand me?” said Rostislawitch. He glanced left and right—was this one of the she-bitch’s agents?
Unlikely, thought the scientist. He smelled to high heaven.
“Be careful, friend,” said Ferguson quickly in Russian. “There are thieves all over, watching for Russians. They take their bags. Sell them.”
Ferguson turned and began walking away.
“What?” said Rostislawitch.
Ferguson pretended not to hear.
“Hey, you, what do you know?” Rostislawitch practically shouted.
“I know a lot,” mumbled Ferguson, just loud enough for Rostislawitch to hear.
“Tell me about this.” People nearby were staring.
“First I get something to eat,” said Ferguson. “Not here.”
Rostislawitch was unsure whether to trust the man. He looked as if he’d lived on the streets for some time, and his Russian was authentic, from Moscow. But his face wasn’t Russian; it didn’t have the Slavic thickness that Rostislawitch expected.
“Where do you come from?” Rostislawitch asked.
“Around.”
“Where in Russia?”
Ferguson shrugged.
“Where in Moscow?” demanded the scientist.
“When I was young, Moscow.”
“Why are you in Naples?”
“Hmmmm,” said Ferguson, nodding.
“That’s not an answer.”
Ferguson started away.
“All right. I’ll buy you something to eat,” said Rostislawitch. “Where?”
“Outside the station. Some place where they can’t hear.”
“Who?”
“The KGB. They’re everywhere.”
“Yes,” said Rostislawitch, not sure if the man was crazy or very sane.
~ * ~
19
CIA BUILDING 24-442
Thomas Ciello put his fingers to his temples and squeezed, trying to relieve his headache. He’d been staring at the computer for so long that his neck and shoulders seemed to have welded themselves into a permanent forward slope. He tried twisting in his chair to loosen his muscles, but even the chair seemed frozen solid. Finally he pushed backward with his feet and rose slowly. Every joint in his body creaked.
“Argh,” he moaned. He hadn’t worked this hard or this long without a break since he set out to solve the August 2004 Alabama Black Triangle UFO sighting.
“Are you all right?”
Corrigan was standing in the doorway. This was a momentous occasion, thought Ciello—Corrigan never visited the research offices.
“I’m just a little tense,” said Ciello. He bent over at his trunk, trying to stretch out his back. His fingers stopped a good foot above his toes.
“OK,” said Corrigan, backing away. “When you get a chance, give me an update.”
“Wait!” yelled Ciello. He started to unfold himself, but his back was locked. He couldn’t move.
“Yes?” asked Corrigan.
“I—Kiska Babev is on her way to Naples.”
“Excuse me?”
“Kiska Babev, the FSB agent. I’ve been tracking her credit card accounts. She bought a plane ticket to Naples a couple of hours ago. Air One. She got it right before for the flight. It’s an hour flight. She may be there by now.”
Corrigan stepped into the room. Ciello was still bent over at the waist. It seemed a little odd, but then again, intelligence analysts were supposed to be odd.
“You’re sure about that?”
“I tracked all her bank accounts down. It hasn’t been easy. I talked to this guy Ferguson knows and—”
“Put it in a report. I have to go to tell Ferg.”
“OK.” Ciello tried again to straighten, but couldn’t. “You think you could help me get unfolded here?” he asked, but Corrigan was already gone.
~ * ~
20
THE SUDAN DESERT
The small airplane was flying low to avoid being picked up on radar. It wa
s so low, in fact, that Atha thought several times they would hit a dune. He grabbed hold of the handle at the side of the windshield strut, gripping it tightly.
As usual, Ahmed was amused. He would tuck the plane up slightly, then back down, staying close to the contours of the earth. The desert was not quite the empty wasteland it looked on many maps. On the contrary, to Ahmed it teemed with life—desperate refugees escaping from Darfur or the Sudan or Chad, militiamen seeking justice or simply enemies, smugglers taking a convenient route. He loved the desert, especially when the radar detector tracked a radar somewhere above. It was impossible to tell what the signal had come from; military flights from Libya and Chad and occasionally NATO fighters crisscrossed the area. All were to be avoided at the pain of death; it was a challenge Ahmed relished.
Ahmed strained against his seat belt as he pushed his small plane forward, tracking through the highlands of northeast Sudan. If a jet were to appear above, he knew precisely what he would do, how he would turn and twist to get away, slinking into the crevices of the mountains ahead.
And then, like a photo suddenly coming into focus, they were there: Ahmed rose over a ridge and the camp spread out below, its buildings clustered around a tiny spring-fed pond in a scar-faced canyon.
Atha took a deep breath as Ahmed legged the plane onto the narrow, dusty landing strip. A great deal of work was about to reach fruition.
The Fuji FA-200 bumped hard on the strip. Ahmed came in a few knots too fast and had trouble braking; he needed the entire strip to stop. Behind him, a crowd of people swarmed the plane, hoping its occupant was in a good mood as he usually was when he returned from a long trip; he was known to throw candy to children and, on rare occasions, coins.
They would be disappointed today. Atha had not had a chance to pick up any sweets. They would gladly forgive him, however, for in many ways he was their savior.
He was also planning to be their executioner, though that part they didn’t know.
Except for the large pond that supplied a modicum of water even during the dry months, Atha’s camp was similar to the larger camps that dotted North Darfur, Sudan, and Chad farther south. Like those, it consisted of huts at irregular though relatively spacious intervals. The walls of the huts were generally made of rushes or other stalks of vegetation, trucked in from many miles away. The tops of these houses were plastic or nylon sheets.
With roughly five thousand people, Atha’s camp was smaller than many of the refugee camps to the south, even those in Chad, which tended to be less imposing than the cities of death in the deserts of West and North Darfur. It had two small permanent structures, made of thick stone and lashed vegetation, their metal roofs covered by plastic sheets so they appeared less conspicuous. But the major difference was the people—compared to the people in the other camps, Atha’s were far better fed, in far better health. For this was a necessary part of the plan: one could not start an epidemic with people who were already sick.
An old Jeep circled around the crowd. A young man in a baggy white tunic and pants stepped out of the Jeep, waving at the people before walking to the plane. Though not yet thirty, the young man was a doctor and a scientist, a man who knew nearly as much about bacteria as Rostislawitch did. Dr. Navid Hamid had, in fact, been a pupil of Rostislawitch’s for a brief time in Moscow, though Hamid doubted he remembered him and Atha had thought it best to conceal that fact from the Russian when he had made his arrangements.
“Atha, you have made it back,” said Dr. Hamid.
“By the grace of Allah, all glory to him,” said Atha, reaching into the back of the plane for the bag.
“This is it?”
“Yes, Doctor. This is it.” Atha handed over the bag. “How soon?”
“I can’t be sure. Perhaps thirty-six hours to have enough to infect the camp—if everything we were told is correct, and if these samples have held up to transport.”
“That was the entire reason for obtaining them,” said Atha.
“As I say, if everything we were told is correct. Thirty-six hours.”
“Go. The minister will want it done even quicker.”
The doctor nodded, then went back to the Jeep. Atha turned and looked at the crowd around him. At least three hundred people were close by, and others were coming as well. Children, women, fathers. Most were members of the Massalit tribe, ethnic Africans from farther south, but there was a good number of Arab Africans as well. Without any exception that Atha knew of, they were Sunnis, though had they been Shiites like him he still would have felt no pity for their fates. The poor were puppets for the powerful; the only relief was to escape poverty. It was the lesson he had taught the spider in the hotel the other day.
“Your passage has been arranged,” he told them in Arabic, speaking in a loud voice. “In a day, perhaps two, your journey will begin. Prepare.”
There was silence. Even though it was the camp’s common tongue, most of the ethnic Africans did not understand Arabic, or at best were far from fluent. But then suddenly one person held up his hand and yelled, “God is great!” and a giant roar of approval went up from the crowd.
~ * ~
21
NAPLES, ITALY
Thera watched as Ferguson walked with Rostislawitch out of the station, toward a restaurant Ferguson had chosen because it had good acoustics for their bugs. The scientist looked dazed, still unsure of what was going on.
Ferguson looked like a paranoid street person.
Thera began following them. She’d bought a cheap shawl and covered her face and head and the top of her torso so she looked like a devout Muslim. With her face covered and Rostislawitch preoccupied, it was a simple but effective disguise, and she was able to get within a few yards without worrying about being recognized.
Because of the screening at the airport, Thera had left her weapons in Bologna, so she’d borrowed Ferguson’s hideaway, a tiny CZ-92 Pocket Automatic barely five inches long. The gun felt almost like a toy in her pocket.
A car veered around the corner, heading toward the side street Ferguson and Rostislawitch had just turned down. The window began to open.
“Get down! Get down!” Thera yelled, throwing off her shawl. She pulled the CZ from her pocket and fired in the direction of the car, just as a submachine gun appeared in the window and began shooting,
~ * ~
~ * ~
1
NAPLES, ITALY
An infinitesimal moment of time passed, the space of a spark passing across an electrode. This shell of a moment contained a universe of action and thought, all possibilities to follow. Standing at its rim, Bob Ferguson saw them all—himself, the car, the submachine gun, Rostislawitch.
Ferguson’s impulse was to push Rostislawitch down, to take cover. But that would have been a mistake; that would have been what the shooter wanted. Instead, Ferguson chose the unexpected.
How much of this was actual thought and how much reflex would have been impossible to say. But in the half second that followed, Ferguson twisted around and grabbed Rostislawitch by the arm, hooking his shoulder and arm into his. Then he threw himself not forward or to the ground but upward, in the direction of the passing car.
He landed on the trunk, dragging Rostislawitch with him. Ferguson threw his hand out, gripping the far side of the car as it sped down the road.
As strong as he was, Ferguson could not hold himself on the trunk of the moving vehicle, let alone support the added weight of Rostislawitch. They slid off the car after a few yards, rolling across the street into the gutter. Ferguson pushed Rostislawitch with him, forward, trying to move in the direction the vehicle had been going. He got another three or four yards before an explosion rent the air behind him.
Fire pitched upward from the side of the street where they’d been walking. Ferguson looked back and saw a sheet of red covering the block.
He had only one thought: where was Thera?
Rostislawitch, head spinning, felt himself being dragged back to his feet. He
’d closed his eyes when the shooting started, clamped them closed as he flew through the air. Now he struggled to reopen them. He was pulled back, dragged toward heat.
“What are we doing?” he screamed in Russian.
His eyes sprang open and his vision returned; the bum whom he’d met in the station had him over his shoulder, carrying him into the fire.
