The Falconer's Tale

by Gordon Kent

“Oil industry.”

  “What’s he know about oil?”

  “He doesn’t have to know anything about it. One, he’s tight with people in the White House; two, he’s big on international policy. Looking ahead ten years, fifty years. Big thinker.”

  “Sending you to Tel Aviv wasn’t big thinking.”

  “It was early days. He was trying stuff on. I was part of his learning curve.”

  “Little hard on you.”

  “Yeah, but not on him.” Spinner laughed. “When I’d completely fucked up in Israel, I sent him an email and said we’d made a mistake. He wrote me back. ‘We don’t make mistakes, and when we do, they become triumphs.’” He laughed again and shook his head.

  Alan signaled for the check and took out a credit card. As if as an afterthought, he said, “When you were at OIA, ever hear of an outfit called Force for Freedom?”

  “Funny you should ask.” Spinner had been ready to get up; now he put his forearms on the table. “It’s a big security company now—you know that, I guess. In 2001, it didn’t exist. Two guys I knew slightly in OIA started it. After I got fired, I went to them and asked for a job. They wouldn’t even talk to me.” He smiled. “McKinnon.”

  “What were these two guys at OIA—security people?”

  “Nah! They were analysts, like me. Shit, one of them was only two years out of college. But they were incredibly gung ho. They were into what OIA called ‘direct action’—preemptive strikes, military solutions to everything. I heard the older guy say in a meeting that the President should declare martial law—this is right after Nine-Eleven—and take over the National Guard from the states. That kind of guys.” He sniggered. “And had either of them been in the military themselves? Ho-ho-ho.”

  “Did they talk about intel operations?”

  “Never heard them comment on that. We weren’t friends or anything. Sorry.”

  “Any idea where they got the money to set up Force for Freedom?”

  Spinner shifted his shoulders, almost a wiggle. “Private money, probably.”

  “Any chance it was DoD money?”

  Spinner seemed uncomfortable with that. “There was a lot of off-the-books money, I guess. Like sending me to Tel Aviv. But about the two guys that set up Force for Freedom, no, that wasn’t the scuttlebutt.” Clearly, he didn’t want to say more. Old loyalty, or caution?

  Craik didn’t want to let it go. He said, “If it was private money, where did it come from?”

  Spinner frowned and fidgeted. Finally, he muttered, “Energy sector. That’s all I’ll say about that.”

  They stood and made their way to the door.

  Before they went their separate ways, Spinner said, “Did you get what you wanted out of me?”

  Alan smiled. “Greta would say you’re being paranoid.”

  They laughed.

  16

  No operational plan survives first contact with the enemy. Taught by instructors, repeated by superiors, often a joke, sometimes in earnest, and never more true than on a sunny morning amid the palm frond-dappled shadows of Mombasa’s Nyali Beach.

  Piat lay on a deck chair with coffee and a bottle of ice water at his elbow. He was only one of hundreds of pale slugs trapped beneath the white heat of the sun. The hotel was full to overflowing, and only bribery had secured him the two rooms that his reservations had supposedly insured. And that was the least of his concerns.

  A fence had been built from the hotel’s “garden lodge” down to the beach. The fence was three meters tall and heavily built, with woven mats stapled over teak. Piat had walked all the way around the enclosure and he knew now what it meant.

  It meant that the uncle, the target, and their entire entourage were completely walled off from unbelievers. They were due to arrive at Daniel Arap Moi International airport in six hours and then they would be driven by limousine over the potholed road from the airport to the hotel. They might be visible for a few moments in the lobby during check-in, just as they had been in Monaco. They might then be vulnerable, however briefly, except that Hackbutt and his priceless bird-oriented brain were still in transit and wouldn’t arrive for a further five hours.

  And then the whole entourage would slip through a heavily guarded door in the north end of the lobby and occupy the garden lodge, as secluded from the other guests as the occupants of a seraglio.

  Piat sat in the sun, sipped coffee, and debated various tactics of desperation.

  The lead idiot plan was to attempt the contact himself. Six weeks of Hackbutt on falconry had taught him enough to know that it was a sport at least as demanding as fishing, with its own cant and its own techniques, from the knots on a bird’s jesses to the way a lure was tied and flung. He knew how men sounded when they attempted to pass as “anglers.” He knew how he would sound if he tried to pass as a falconer. And he knew what Partlow would say if Saudi intelligence made him on his first pass.

  So he considered trying to buy a hotel staffer. Really buy the guy—ten thousand US, cash and carry. Big money on the beach in Africa. But for what? And at what risk?

  Bad idea. Really bad idea. Except that Piat was constitutionally unable to simply surrender to the inevitable and walk away. Rather than abandon the whole thing, he’d take some insane risk.

  Which Partlow really ought to have known. Ought to have watched out for. The more Piat thought about it, the more he thought that he was being his own case officer, and that left him with no shoulder to lean on, much less cry on. He allowed himself a lot of traitorous thoughts on the beach at Nyali—for instance, he reminded himself that he’d already made a fuck of a lot of money off Partlow and there was no reason for him to give a shit whether they got the target or not.

  Except that he was wired to focus on the needs of his agents and the realization of his operational objectives, and the wiring held. Despite the money and the risks and the fact that nothing about Saudi money or “possible al-Qaeda” terrorists stirred his blood by an iota.

  So he sat in the shade of the palms and watched the fence and thought.

  One of the few attractive bonuses associated with the hotel for a man in Piat’s position was that the café had a plate glass window that looked in on the lobby. It was not an arrangement that Piat could recall encountering in other five-star hotels, but it made his second reconnaissance of the entourage a matter of alertness and discipline rather than the high-risk maneuver he’d had to use in Monaco. He sat at the coffee bar against the window and watched the guests arrive in neat pulses, to the tune of airline arrivals. His own familiarity with the evening’s schedule allowed him to note them silently as they arrived—Air Kenya, Lufthansa, British Airways. Different looks, different luggage, different cabin crew.

  The entourage arrived on Gulf Air, and their limousines beat the hotel’s buses by quite a margin. Two of the security men—by now Piat thought that they were Saudi intelligence officers—came through the door as soon as the limos stopped outside and walked to the desk with a stack of passports. Both of them glanced over the lobby. They weren’t thorough, and they weren’t interested in the glass window to the café.

  Behind them came a solid phalanx of women. They were expensively dressed, and just as in Monaco their laughter could be heard through the window and over the omnipresent air-conditioning. Piat recognized the first woman through the door from Monaco—she had Chanel sunglasses, dark red, perched atop her black hair, and she was over fifty, handsome in a craggy way, and loud. Imperious. It struck Piat that despite the differences in culture and race, Irene might very well become that woman in ten years.

  Piat assumed she was the principal wife. The uncle had four of them, all political choices, all brought to him as tribal connections, according to Partlow’s reports. Piat knew a lot more about the uncle this time, and he used his new knowledge to try and match names to faces.

  Each of the other wives had her own retinue. The four of them did not congregate, didn’t laugh together or share conveyance. They had probably come from the
airport in separate cars. Piat watched them come in and wondered what reptilian security guru had decided that the uncle could use his wives as bait in the event of an ambush, because the great man himself came in last, flanked by the rest of his security. He came in fast, as if they actually feared a threat in the lobby of the Nyali. By the time he entered, the check-in was complete—the great man himself never stopped moving across the lobby, only pausing at the teak door to the garden lodge to acknowledge the bow of a senior manager, and then he was gone.

  Piat’s heart beat harder. He forced himself to sit still for five more minutes until the very last attendant had passed from the lobby to the garden lodge, until the red taillights of the five limos had faded into the warm African night. Then he walked out of the café to the lobby terrace and then down the steps and then all the way down the drive to the three-lane-wide main road, where a party of hotel staffers waited in uniformed dignity to be picked up by their buses and whisked away to their huts, far from the eyes of the tourists.

  He was thorough, and he looked everywhere. He walked through the unlit darkness of the African night, located the tea shop where the matatu drivers waited for their fares and where he asked who had been at the airport, but he’d known the truth from the moment he had seen the uncle.

  His target, his lawful prey, the object of his operation, Prince Bandar Muhad al-Hauq, had not arrived at the hotel.

  After an hour in his room consuming alcohol, Piat remembered the truck. The anomalous truck, the one mentioned in Partlow’s report that he’d read in Turin so many weeks before that it seemed like another lifetime.

  Piat bludgeoned his memory, already a little the worse for wear from booze, until he decided that the truck was supposed to come from Avis.

  Once he’d established this fact to his own satisfaction, he stopped drinking.

  He hadn’t planned to meet Hackbutt and Irene at the airport. He had planned to send Mike, the driver he’d acquired for the week with recommendations from Partlow, to collect them. But now he had reason to be at the airport, and the security concerns that had prevented him from wanting a public meeting with his agents were now running a poor second place to his need to reacquire his target.

  By the time Hackbutt and Irene landed in Mombasa late that night, Piat had moved down the beach to the Serena. There was no longer any reason to expose himself, or them, to the Saudis at the Nyali. He arranged for his driver to meet them in arrivals carrying a sign with their names that Piat wrote out himself in heavy magic marker to avoid surprises.

  Piat himself went to the Avis counter with a wad of twenty-dollar bills. It was, by a miracle, manned. The occupant was there only to service his reservations coming off the London flight, but he was happy to take some of Piat’s money—more than he earned in a week’s work—and doubly happy to tell Piat that the truck had been rented to an African with a Sudanese passport and a Saudi driver’s license, but the prince had been two steps away, had provided the credit card, had been polite. The Sudanese was the driver of record. When the Avis counter rep had been paid his fifth US twenty-dollar bill, he copied the whole form for Piat on his office copier. The form contained a lot of useless detail—but it gave their destination.

  Nguri Lodge, Tsavo East—a game park a couple of hours’ drive inland.

  “Sorry we’re late, Jack,” Hackbutt called around his wife. “We sat in Brussels forever.” He looked like hell. “One of my birds got sick. Carla—a buzzard. You remember her?”

  Piat gave them both a tolerant grin. “I’m just glad you’re here. We’ve had a few changes in plans.” He picked up one of Irene’s bags. Mike picked up the rest.

  Piat waved Mike over. “Can you get us a four-wheel drive, Mike? Since we’re here at the airport?”

  Mike was a tall, thin man with a deeply serious expression. His English was excellent, as was his Italian and German. Mike was a good driver, and he’d come recommended in a number of ways. He seemed to consider for several seconds. “You want to go on safari, bwana?”

  Piat nodded. “I want to go out to Tsavo East tomorrow, Mike.”

  Mike looked at his watch. He looked at it a lot, as it was clearly one of his prize possessions, a big Seiko chronograph, the gift of a former customer. “Not tonight, bwana. I’ll get it in the morning, okay?”

  Piat knew that “getting it in the morning” meant that Mike would have to rise before four, to walk to the bus stop from which he could get to the airport—all so they could have a car by eight. And it was nearly midnight now.

  Piat gave him a twenty off his roll. “That’s okay, Mike. We’ll want it early.”

  At eight in the morning, the three of them left their hotel with boxes of sandwiches and hats, binoculars and bug repellent and shorts and shoes—and all their luggage. Luck and telephone charm had got Piat a reservation at Nguri Lodge. It was a much smaller hotel with only fifty rooms. He was taking a number of chances. First, that his hunch was right and that the prince would go—virtually alone—to Tsavo. To this hotel. Second, that he would still be there. On and on—more risks than he wanted to face, but this was the stage of an operation where everything became one long set of risks—some avoidable, some not.

  Hackbutt started the ride in the dumps but he recovered as soon as they had left the litter and pollution of Mombasa behind them and turned north into the countryside. Hackbutt kept referring to the road as a “country road,” when in fact the two-lane tarmacked strip was the main highway from Mombasa to Nairobi. There weren’t any support services on the highway except tea shops and petrol stops with ill-spelled signs and single windows for service. Towns were infrequent and looked like boom towns in America’s old west—a single street of shops painted in garish colors with tall false fronts. Blink and you missed it—that was Mariakani.

  They stopped for a late breakfast at a truck stop. Piat wolfed down two heavy cakes laden with sugar and drank a cup of excellent coffee. Kenya didn’t have bad coffee anywhere. Irene watched him eat the cakes with something like horror, and Hackbutt raised his hands as if in surrender and ate from his hotel lunch.

  It was noon by the time they reached the gates of the park. A line of matatus and four-wheel-drive vehicles was queued up fifty vehicles long. Mike sighed.

  “Jesus,” Piat said. He had been impatient since he had got in the car, various nightmare scenarios playing out in his head: the prince was at Tsavo for one night—was already back—would pass them on the road.

  Mike shrugged. “You want me to get us in the gate, Bwana?”

  “Sure.”

  “Cost you fifty dollars.” Mike shrugged, as if the venality of his countrymen was a source of perpetual astonishment.

  Piat counted out the money.

  Mike drove past the waiting vehicles, pulled up into an apparently closed bay, and honked his horn.

  The man from the first bay completed his altercation with a matatu driver and then crossed over. Other drivers in the line honked, then shouted. Matatu drivers tended to be free spirits, or even rebels—and they didn’t like to wait. The gate guard shouted a phrase that was so heavily accented that Piat couldn’t even recognize the language. Mike grunted and replied calmly in his own clearly accented Swahili. Piat’s Swahili ran to about fifty words, and he understood nothing of Mike’s rapid flow.

  Then Mike handed over the fifty dollars.

  The guard brightened up, took the money, and raised the barrier. “Habari!” he shouted at the occupants of the car. Irene waved. Piat called “Habari ya leo!” and they were through the gate. Mike gave Piat a big smile.

  Piat clapped him on the shoulder. “Nicely done.”

  Mike nodded. “I told them you were all citizens, yes? And you say—Habari ya leo! Just like Ki-setla. Now the guard, he thinks maybe you are citizens.”

  Piat nodded. “Except that we bribed him.”

  Mike shook his head vehemently. “No bribe, bwana Jack. We paid for tickets. Perhaps we overpay or perhaps it slips his mind to give us change. Perhaps he
doesn’t have change. Perhaps he doesn’t know the exchange rate for US dollars. But there was no bribe.” He gave Piat a look that he knew well from the corridors of the Agency, a look that meant Please cooperate with me in this little deception.

  Piat said, “My brochure says everyone has to show a passport to enter the park and put their name down on some sort of register.”

  Mike drove for a few minutes, avoiding the mammoth potholes that nearly filled the road and pointing out the first watering holes to the north of the track. His eyes were flicking between the horizon and the surface of the road. Finally he cracked a smile. “I think maybe you’d rather not show passport,” he said.

  Piat could see why Mike came with such recommendations.

  Before they had driven for forty minutes they had seen two prides of lions and enough zebra to satisfy every tourist in Africa.

  “I didn’t know they were all so fat!” Irene shouted over the noise of the car. “I thought they were just fat in zoos!”

  Piat turned around. “Zebras are the method nature uses to store protein for predators,” he shouted.

  Hackbutt thought it was funny, and Irene did not.

  For an hour the terrain had grown more broken, the flat, dry savannah giving way to the first hills of the plateau. A small river crossed their track. The ford was flooded and deeply cut by heavy tires and tracks. Mike drove well north of the ford to spare his undercarriage. In the process they found a herd of more than a hundred elephants, and they stayed with the animals for another hour. Irene was delighted, alternatively speechless and then babbling with something like ecstasy—so many, all together, the old bulls and the young bulls and the matriarch and her daughters, eating and playing and walking.

  Hackbutt was less interested in the elephants than in the birdlife. He kept up a running commentary on a migrant falcon he saw in a tree and couldn’t identify, and he kept interrupting Mike’s dissertation to Irene on elephant habits with questions about nesting birds.

  “That looks like a grouse,” he shouted.