by Larry Bond
“Just have the photo taken then,” Kiska told him. “Get an identification. We’ll see who he is.”
“Yes, Colonel. It will be done.”
~ * ~
A
half hour into the flight, his gin and tonic finished—aircrew could never be trusted with martinis—Nathaniel Hamilton went to the lavatory and sat on the toilet. He took out his cell phone and broke it open, then reached into his pocket for what looked like a metal pen. He put the tip in his mouth and twisted, loosening it after considerable effort. Once the tip was gone, he pushed the plunger at the opposite end and pulled out what, in a real pen, would have been the ink cartridge. In this case, it was a collection of 25mm bullets, molded together so that they would appear harmless under an X-ray, especially to a harried security examiner. Hamilton extracted the bullets and placed each one in the cell phone, filling it up. Then he flushed the toilet, thoroughly washed his hands, and went back to his seat, apologizing to the rotund woman on the aisle and the man who looked like a dachshund in the center seat.
Hamilton stuffed a pillow behind his head, then took out his Tripoli guidebook and studied the city map. Ferguson’s man had not told him where Ferguson, or Rostislawitch for that matter, was going to be. Even though Hamilton had a relatively clear idea of what would happen—obviously Ferguson had arranged for some sort of meeting between the scientist and Atha—Ferguson’s lackey had neglected to say in his message where it was going to happen.
Hard to tell with the Americans whether that was on purpose or not, but given that he had failed to answer Hamilton’s two requests for the information, it certainly appeared purposeful.
There were hundreds of hotels and restaurants in Tripoli, and the possible locations for clandestine meetings in the more usual suspects like back alleys and docks approached infinity.
Generally an operative like Ferguson would stick to a place he was already familiar with, especially if he didn’t have time to set up beforehand. The problem was, Hamilton had no idea whether Ferguson had even been to Tripoli before, let alone where he might have worked there. Once again Hamilton was flying blind, and he didn’t like it.
Hamilton paged through the book, refreshing his mental map of the city. More than likely, the meet would be a neutral place, public so that the Iranian would feel relatively safe. Ferguson had used hotels and restaurants in Bologna; since that was his modus operandi, Hamilton flipped to the restaurant listings and began looking at the entries.
The Tripoli Restaurant, owned by the Gadhafi family?
No. A connection with the government might be messy.
The Safari, featuring live animals as entertainment?
Too many distractions.
Ile de France? Ferguson hated French restaurants.
Hamilton flipped over to the hotel section. The Libyan Renaissance? Very high-class, very chic, the place to see and be seen for the restless, wealthy set.
No. Too much of a chance of a Paris Hilton type getting in the way of the action.
The Alfonse—once reputed to be owned by gangsters. Now that was the sort of place Ferguson would like.
Hamilton marked the page and continued down the list.
~ * ~
24
TRIPOLI, LIBYA
Atha was so anxious when they finally landed at the Tripoli airport that he left Ahmed and went straight to the Alfonse, the hotel where Rostislawitch had said to look for him.
The Alfonse’s lobby was a pleasantly large space, with couches and chairs parked in different groupings to give a show of intimacy. There was a piano, some very thick rugs, and thin side tables. A wide staircase led to reception rooms on the second floor. The check-in counter was opposite the front doors, albeit separated by a good eighty feet.
Atha went to the desk and asked if Rostislawitch had checked in; the clerk said he had but would not reveal his room number. Atha started to argue, but before he could say anything the man picked up a phone and held it out to him.
“Call his room. The operator will connect you.”
Atha looked around, trying to see where the operator was, but couldn’t. He got a computerized voice telling him the guest he had called was unavailable, but he could leave a message.
“This is Atha. I’m in the lobby,” he said, then hung up.
Atha went over to the Steinway piano and sat on a sideless couch next to it, which gave him a good view of the hallway leading to the elevator. Arms crossed, he tried to lean back on the couch, telling himself to relax though he knew it was hopeless.
~ * ~
U
pstairs, Ferguson opened his suitcase and took out the hair coloring kit, adding some gray highlights to his temples and sideburns—just a touch, the way he remembered his father when they first moved to Cairo. Then he took a fake moustache, fiddled with it a bit, put it back, selected a beard.
Too much.
The Fu Manchu looked good, but that wasn’t particularly Russian.
He went back to the beard. Ferguson didn’t mind if Atha thought it was a disguise; he just didn’t want him to connect the man wearing it to any glimpse he’d had in Bologna.
A pair of thick-rimmed glasses, his hair slicked back, a thick wool sweater—the overall effect was Russian, with a slight nod toward Berlin in the sixties.
The video feed showed Atha was still sitting alone in the lobby, rocking back and forth impatiently. Ferguson decided that he couldn’t keep the Iranian waiting much longer. He stuck the Walther under his sweater, tucked a magazine of bullets in his left boot and a smoke grenade in his right, then went down to play Let’s Make a Deal.
~ * ~
25
CIA BUILDING 24-442
Thomas Ciello had used the scripts Fibber had given him to map out Kiska Babev’s travels based on her credit card expenditures. That had allowed Ciello to find possible connections between two of the T Rex assassinations, one in Seoul, Korea, where she had visited a week before a murder, and one in Turkey, when she had been in Romania a day later.
The fact that the connections were tangential didn’t bother Ciello; any experienced intelligence agent would be careful about leaving a trail that directly matched with a murder he or she committed, and an assassin with a reputation and track record like T Rex’s would be even more thorough.
But what did bother Ciello was the sheer paucity of records, tangential or otherwise.
He loved that word, paucity; it reminded him of the 1953 Pawtucket UFO incident, where the lack of information about a scheduled aircraft flight that disappeared from radar scopes for three minutes and thirteen seconds could only be explained as an alien abduction incidence, a fact proven by the lack of information about the incident.
In this case, the lack of information suggested not that he was dealing with a UFO incident—Ciello knew he could not be so lucky— but rather that he was missing a great number of accounts. Clearly, Kiska had other credit cards that he was not yet aware of. If he found them, he reasoned, he would undoubtedly find more definitive proof that she was T Rex.
And when he found it, he would be able to expunge—another of his favorite words, though not linked to a UFO case—the dark cloud hanging over him for his alleged misidentification of the nature of the Bologna attack.
Corrigan, of course, thought that two connections, along with the air trip to France, were proof enough. He had sidetracked Ciello with other assignments, telling him to dig up information about Iran’s biological research labs and Libyan hotels. But finally, scut work done, Ciello began trying to puzzle out how to find the accounts.
Comparative searches—looking for similar expenses—were useless in this case, because the accounts were used so sporadically that the pattern they established matched three-quarters of the bank’s accounts. He had to work the other way—he needed to know Kiska’s other aliases.
Ciello couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t already in her file. It was fairly easy to forge documents in Russia, so Kiska could be literally a
nyone. The problem for most people when they adopted a phony identity, however, was that they needed some way to keep track of it. That was why many agents who used different names to cloud their identity kept their first name or some variation; it was much easier to remember.
Kiska’s cousin in the mental institution had six different accounts, all apparently used by Kiska. Her parents, who lived nearby, had one—which was clearly not used by Kiska, since the charges were all made within a fifty-mile radius of their home.
Ciello felt his back tightening up again and decided he had best take a break. He got up from his computer and stretched gently. Then he lay down on the floor, arms over his head, legs straight out. He closed his eyes.
The harsh overhead lights of his office shone through his eyelids. The white spots hovered together, like a fleet of spaceships spinning together.
Friends.
Or rather, other patients.
Ciello jumped up and began entering the address of the nursing home into one of the search scripts for the bank companies.
~ * ~
26
TRIPOLI, LIBYA
Ferguson walked out of the elevator and turned right past the back of the grand staircase. He swung around past the restaurant, avoided the maid cleaning the carpet with a vacuum that looked fifty years old, and headed toward the Steinway piano. He pointed his gaze straight ahead, oblivious to everything around him. He passed Atha, then spun around quickly, pointing at the Iranian’s face.
“Anghuyu Jahan, you are here to see Dr. Rostislawitch,” he said in Russian.
Atha said in Farsi that he didn’t speak Russian. Ferguson pointed at Atha, turned his head left and right to look around, then sat down in the chair across from him.
“Do you speak English?” said Atha.
“I can speak English,” said Ferguson, injecting a heavy Russian accent into his voice. “You are here for Dr. Rostislawitch. Your name is Anghuyu Jahan. You have people call you Atha. You are not to be trusted.”
“Wait just a second.”
Ferguson leaned forward. “No, Mr. Atha, as you call yourself, you wait. Who do you think you are dealing with? Just a professor from a laboratory? What do you think?”
Atha was not about to be bullied. “Tell Dr. Rostislawitch when he is ready to talk with me, he can communicate in the usual manner,” he said, rising.
“I suggest you sit down, Mr. Atha,” said Ferguson, showing his drawn pistol.
The Iranian frowned. “What is this?”
“This is a discussion to see if it is worth Dr. Rostislawitch’s trouble to meet with you.”
“Why did he want me to come to Tripoli?”
“Because someone tried to kill him in Naples,” said Ferguson.
“Who would want to kill him?” said Atha sharply.
“Perhaps you can tell me.”
“I don’t deal with the mafiya. It’s bad for business.”
“What is the mafiya? What is it?” said Ferguson, his voice just a notch too loud. “A figment of a newswriter’s imagination. I am just a business consultant.” Ferguson slipped his gun back in his belt and modulated his voice. “A friend.”
“How do I know you’re not FSB?”
“Perhaps I am.”
Atha scowled, but behind the mask he presented to the Russian he began to relax. This was a businessman with whom he could make a deal. The arrangements made more sense now—the scientist wouldn’t have thought about holding back an essential ingredient on his own, but a man like this, probably fronting for other men, a network, would. And he would have wanted the meeting to take place here, in Tripoli, where the authorities could be counted on if necessary. Italy would be too problematic.
It also explained what had happened on the dock in Naples. Of course. He should have realized that a man like Rostislawitch, all brain, would need some brawn to complete a transaction. More than likely he was part of some sort of network; very possibly they had made these sorts of deals before.
The only question was how to make sure he wasn’t cheated. He’d dealt with the type he saw across from him before; you couldn’t show weakness, but on the other hand, if you were too antagonistic they became irrationally angry.
“Maybe, if Dr. Rostislawitch is willing, we can make an arrangement to our mutual benefit,” said Atha. “But I have to talk to him.”
“That can be arranged. If it is worthwhile.”
Ferguson looked over and saw a blond-haired woman coming through the door—Kiska Babev.
Impeccable timing.
“What?” said Atha, immediately sensing something was wrong.
“The Russian FSB. Very inconvenient.”
Before Atha could say anything, Ferguson jumped up and jerked Atha with him to the right. A loud pop echoed under the piano. Its strings vibrated loudly, and suddenly smoke began to fill the lobby.
“Fire!” yelled Ferguson in English as he pushed Atha toward the hall. “Fire!”
A woman who had just come down the steps began to scream. At the desk, Kiska turned and caught a glimpse of someone running away, but the smoke was so thick she couldn’t make out if they were man or woman. Kiska began to choke.
“The blue car across the street,” Ferguson told Atha as they reached the side hall.
Atha, unsure whether this was real or a performance, tried to slow his pace, but Ferguson wouldn’t let him.
“The car. Now. Quickly,” Ferguson said, pushing Atha through the door. He switched to Russian, calling the Iranian a fat toad who was going to get them killed.
The car was parked across the street where Ferrone had left it earlier. Ferguson opened the doors with the remote key and slid in, bumping his legs on the bottom of the dashboard because the CIA station chief liked to drive right on top of the wheel and had left the seat that way. Ferguson cursed—in Russian, and in character—and started the engine. As soon as Atha closed the door, he peeled out.
“I don’t believe any of this,” said Atha.
Ferguson yanked the wheel hard, turning down a narrow side street. He mashed the accelerator, then slammed the brakes and took another turn.
Atha’s fingers fumbled to connect his seat belt. By the time he had gotten it buckled, Ferguson had turned back onto the street in front of the hotel. He drove to the corner, then pulled over. A pair of black Mercedes had driven up in front of the hotel; large men, obviously concealing weapons beneath their coats, were waiting near the door. The blonde Atha had just seen inside—Kiska, though he didn’t know her name—came out coughing with another woman and a man. They got into the cars and sped off.
Ferguson pulled out from his spot, running the light as he hit the gas.
“What are you doing?” asked Atha.
“Following to see if they go to the Russian embassy. You want proof that they are FSB.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said Atha. “Let’s go somewhere and discuss our business.”
~ * ~
27
NORTHEASTERN SUDAN
“The truck has not returned yet. If the plane was shot down, they should have found it. If not, they should be back.”
Dr. Navid Hamid looked up from his computer. It took considerable effort to comprehend the Palestinian’s words, not because they were spoken in a foreign language—Dr. Hamid had learned Arabic as a child—but because he was absorbed in the scientific language of bacteria and DNA. He had been studying information published by one of Rostislawitch’s associates on the techniques they had used to manipulate the genes in E. coli. Understanding the papers was difficult, even for Hamid, though it was written in French, which he was fluent in.
“The airplane that flew over the camp was not shot down?” Hamid asked.
“It was hit. We saw smoke. But what happened we do not know for sure. The men we sent out to look for it have not returned. It was three hours.”
“Why did you wait so long to tell me?”
The Palestinian did not like to be berated, especially by a man who spe
nt his days inside and did not understand the difficult strain of running the camp.
“There was much else going on, and you said you should not be disturbed.”
“They don’t have radios?”
“The radios don’t work over the ridge.”
Dr. Hamid rubbed his eyes. “Send someone.”
“As you wish,” said the Palestinian, starting to leave.
