The garage was big enough to do the type of work Al-Bari wanted, and dilapidated enough that no one would be asking many questions if it did, provided the price was right. Al-Bari parked the camper next to Arazi’s Toyota, got out carrying a thick roll of blueprints, and looked around. Columbia bragged that it was ‘The Chemical Capital of the South.’ Al-Bari wrinkled up his nose. The town smelled, and it reminded him of Beirut or Kandahar on a smaller and trashier scale, but without the dead bodies. Despite the obvious problems, only the nosey EPA or an exceedingly rare inspector from Richmond would see anything out of the ordinary here. In Columbia, a man minded his own business.
The overhead door was up on the garage’s center bay, so Al-Bari walked inside, glancing around at the dirt, grease, and clutter. A twangy country song about painting Billy Jean’s name on the town water tower in John Deere green blared from a portable radio on the workbench, and various car doors, fenders, wheels, and a welding torch were strewn about the floor and propped against the building’s outer walls. The bay to the far right was empty. There was a late-model Ford compact on a lift in the center bay with two of its tires off, and a rusting pick-up truck sitting in the bay closest to the office. Its hood was up, and two thin, long-haired locals were underneath, bent over the motor. One of them glanced up at Al-Bari, spit on the floor, and pointed toward the office.
Al-Bari did as the man suggested, walked to the office, and stuck his head inside. It had grime-encrusted knee-to-ceiling windows on the front and far side, and an old Playboy calendar from 2003 hanging on the wall. That might have been the last time the windows had been washed, Al-Bari thought. There was another waist-high window between the office and the garage, but it had no glass. In the center of the room sat an ancient wooden desk, piled high with parts catalogs and stacks of invoices, receipts, and other business papers, most of which had oily black stains and smudges on them.
Behind the desk sat a large man with a big beer gut who Al-Bari knew had been watching him since he got out of the truck. To get into the office, Al-Bari had to step over an old bloodhound that was lying across the doorway at his feet. The dog’s eyes were closed, flies buzzed around its head, and its tongue hung out of its mouth onto the floor.
“Ya’ll mind the dog, now,” the fat man warned.
“Is it alive?”
“Like most things in these parts, it is when it wants to be.”
Al-Bari smiled as he stepped over the dog and entered the small office. “You must be Mr. Dante,” he said. “My name is Hector Florakis, with Virginia Pipeline. I phoned you last week about some modifications we need on a camper truck of ours.”
“Let’s see, last week…” Dante frowned. “Oh, sure, now I remember,” he said as he realized this olive-skinned stranger was neither a cop nor a bill collector, and broke into a broad, toothy grin. “Ya’ll come on in here and have a seat,” he said as he pointed to two folding chairs in front of the desk. “Let me move a few of these things so we can talk,” he added, as he picked up several of the stacks of paper and catalogs from his desk and dropped them in the corner. He turned his head and spat into a bucket on the floor, wiped his hands down the sides of his flannel shirt, and extended a meaty paw toward his guests. “The name’s Rufus Dante. Pleased to meet ya Mister Flo-ra-kis.”
Al-Bari shook the man’s hand in return and said, “I will be candid with you, Mr. Dante. My company dropped a big surveying project on me last week and I am on a very tight time line.”
“Ya’ll call me Rufus, and I know all about them time lines,” Dante commiserated.
As Arazi joined them, Al-Bari added, “This is my associate, Mr. Suarez, and if you can do it, I’m afraid we need the work done very, very quickly.”
“Well, we can do most anything, you know. ‘Course, droppin’ everything else we got goin’ on and expeditin’ your work could cost you a bit more. But before we get to all that, what exactly is it ya’ll need done?”
Al-Bari handed the thick roll of blueprints to Dante. The fat man pushed the remaining trash aside and rolled them out on the desktop. He licked his fingertips, leaned forward, and slowly flipped through the pages, apparently more conversant with blueprints and engineering drawings than Al-Bari expected. “It must hold all of our equipment so we can go out to the field and stay there,” Al-Bari told him. “That way, we don’t have to bring the survey and GPS gear back and forth to the shop every day. That is getting us way behind schedule, and time is worth a lot of money in our business.” He smiled earnestly.
“Worth a lot ‘a money in any business, son,” Dante said. When he reached the last page, he paused and finally looked up at Al-Bari and said, “You must be plannin' to tote some real heavy stuff there, Mr. Flo-ra-kis. Them steel plates you want and that reinforced floor and heavy-duty shocks…”
“We must have a stable platform for…”
“Oh, you’ll have plenty of stability, all right,” Dante laughed. “The question is, will she carry the weight. It’s one thing when she’s parked and you can get her all nice and leveled off, but when you take her out on the road, she's gonna wallow and ride top-heavy, like Cousin Billy’s hay wagon.”
“I understand, but we won’t be driving far between survey sessions and it is the stability when we are parked that is paramount.” Al-Bari told him. “You see, the camper gives us the type of mobility we need out in the field, but we can’t have the suspension bouncing us up and down when we are at work. It throws off all our calibrations. That is why we need a metal floor plate put in the truck bed above the regular one, with hydraulic jacks tied in at each corner. On Page 4 there, you’ll see the details of what I mean,” Al-Bari said as he flipped back a few pages. “You can see how the jacks will go all the way down to the ground. If we extend them two inches further, it will lift the false floor up and we’ll have a solid, level platform to work on.”
“You know, that’s right clever,” Dante said, truly impressed.
“The floor needs to be a half-inch steel plate,” the Arab continued. “We want it reinforced around the edges with steel bars. The jacks retract up inside the body, and away we go.” He looked over at Dante and asked, “Can it be done?”
“Well, I can’t see why not… then there’s this big old sun roof you want,” Dante said as he flipped back a few pages.
“Ah, you noticed. I was just going to point that out to you.”
“Oh, I saw it,” Dante nodded. “Kinda hard to miss.”
“Good. Then you saw that it is six feet by six feet, opens in the center, and tilts upright to each side.”
Dante nodded as he rubbed the stubble on his chin. “None of this is ‘off-the-shelf’ you know. Maybe the shocks, but the steel plate, the reinforcing bars, the brackets, and the skylights — we’ll have to make all that.”
“I expected that,” Al-Bari conceded. “Can you do it?”
“Oh, we can do about anything, it’s just that some things just cost a mite more than others, ‘specially if you’re in a big hurry, like you said you was.”
“You’ll also see some steel brackets here on the floor,” Al-Bari pointed out. “That is where we’ll mount the base plate for our machinery, so they must be double welded onto the floor plates. I also want some wooden cabinets added inside for storage, so we can stow all of our gear, but that’s minor.”
“Still, that’s a whole lot of work you got there,” Dante smiled as he shook his head. “It ain’t gonna be cheap.”
“How much?” Al-Bari asked, as if it mattered.
“Well, I’ll need to do some take-offs and do a bit of figurin’…”
“How much?”
Dante eyed Al-Bari and rubbed his chin again before he flipped through the drawings a second time. “Gotta be seven… no, more like eight thousand,” he said as he looked up at Al-Bari again. When those numbers did not appear to faze the man, Dante quickly added, “Plus parts and material, of course.”
“Of course. When can you have it finished?”
“Well n
ow, Mr. Flo-ra-kis,” Dante stammered, as Al-Bari could see the little wheels turning around inside his head. “You can see how backed up we are… and gettin' all them parts? Gotta take two, maybe three weeks.”
“I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Dante… Rufus. I do not have two or three weeks. I do not have one. I will double your price and give you sixteen thousand dollars, plus parts and material, of course, if you can have it done by next Thursday.”
“Thursday? Lord, that only gives me six days.”
“The rest of today, plus Thursday, almost seven.”
“Yeah, but…”
“No ‘yeah buts.’ Sixteen thousand dollars, plus a bonus of two thousand more to perk your interest. Let us round up the number and say $25,000 for everything — parts, material, labor, taxes, and out the door. All cash.”
“Cash, you say?”
“Cash. It makes all the billing, the credit checks, and the accounting so much simpler.”
“Indeed it does.”
“And you can have everything done by Thursday evening?”
Dante rose to his feet and extended his hand again. “Mister Flo-ra-kis, for that much money, I'll even throw in the dog.”
They shook on it as Al-Bari reached inside his jacket and pulled out a thick envelope from which he counted out $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills and placed them on the desk in front of Dante. “A deposit to cover your upfront costs, and to demonstrate how serious I am. Until Thursday then, Rufus. However, I do have one more very important requirement. See to it you keep this quiet. Very quiet. You know how brutal the competition can be these days. Do you understand me?”
“Oh, mum's the word, Mr. Florakis. You can count on me. Mum's the word.”
“And here are the keys,” Al-Bari said as he turned and walked out the door, again stepping over the prostrate dog.
As he and Arazi got into the rental car, they could hear Dante's voice call out from inside the office. “Bobby Lee, you and Taylor push that damned truck of yours out the back and get your ass in here, boy. And call your brother. We got us some payin' work!”
As they drove away, Al-Bari turned to Arazi laughing and said, “God protect us from these people, Hafez. God protect us, but our time has come. Our time has finally come. It is only a matter of days now.”
They looked at each other and smiled.
“I had hoped we would have a little longer,” Arazi replied.
“It is not our schedule; it is theirs. I suspect that questions are already being asked — in Washington, in their Hoover FBI Building, perhaps in the White House, and even in Beirut.”
“Beirut, Ibrahim? But I thought…”
“I have many enemies, Hafez. I always have. Soon, they will all be looking for us in earnest, but they will be too late.”
“I understand, Ibrahim.”
“I know you do, and I am depending on it. We will drive back to Washington. Soon it will be time for you and me to go back to Boston and visit our old friend Sean Murphy. But I can feel it now, Hafez. The clock is ticking. Soon we shall see the fear and panic in their eyes. Then we shall strike and we shall have our revenge.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Washington, DC, Sunday, October 14, 1:00 a.m.
Ibrahim Al-Bari was correct. Questions were being asked in the American capital, but they were being asked in the basement conference room of the Israeli Embassy, not in the Hoover FBI Building, the State Department, Homeland Security, nor the White House for that matter. The location seemed like an odd choice when Rachel Ullman first suggested it, but Barnett did not want the meetings held anywhere near his meddling FBI bosses. Mouse had a similar problem. In the end, the Israeli Embassy offered near perfect privacy and security, and The Hog, Barnett’s first choice, was not open 24/7.
They had been studying files and reaching out to sources for two days now, with little to show for the effort. “All right, what are they up to?” Rachel Ullman asked no one in particular. She leaned back in her chair and rubbed the tips of her fingers into her temples, trying to make her incessant headache go away. “We have been over and over the same ground, and we are not one step closer to a credible answer.”
“That is not entirely correct,” Mouse replied as he heated water for another cup of tea. “All our foreign sources — yours and ours — have come up with nothing, and we can infer a few things from that.”
“Such as?” Ullman asked as she eyed him coldly.
“Each of our countries has thrown significant intelligence resources into this. Barnett’s people have turned loose the CIA and the NSA with all their field assets and electronic wizardry. You have Mossad agents in all the Arab countries, plus paid informants inside the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, Libya, Syria, Iran…”
“And Egypt,” Ullman added.
“Yes, and Egypt, and we have people in all the same places, too.”
“They’re probably the same ones,” Barnett said. “You guys ought to compare notes.”
“I thought that was what we were doing,” Mouse answered. “Despite all those efforts, we have come up with nothing — nothing at all — and I am becoming convinced it is because there is nothing more to come up with.”
“We know he is here.”
“Here, yes, but none of our Middle East sources know what he is up to any more than we do. Clearly, he has gone to ground and is hiding from everyone. He is not getting any help from Beirut or anywhere else, because his operation isn’t sanctioned.”
“That’s the only thing that makes any sense,” Barnett agreed.
“So what?” Ullman asked irritably as she lit another cigarette, ignoring the ‘No Smoking’ signs posted around the room. “That still tells us nothing.”
“It tells us that we already have all the clues we are likely to get.”
“What would you have us do then? Quit?”
“No, we must think,” Mouse replied, keeping his own temper in check. “We missed something. Al-Bari is an exceptionally dangerous man and whatever he is up to, he has a plan, one that will give us all nightmares. However, there are clues in the little bits and pieces of what we already know. Consider the money.”
“We have been over that!” Ullman snapped. “To buy what? To do what?”
“Something very specific. He is not a scientist, a chemist, or a physicist. For those reasons, I do not believe he chose some type of exotic weapon.” Mouse said calmly but persuasively. “First and foremost, he is a foot soldier. His plan will be a tactical one, and the weapon he chooses will be something he knows how to use. If that is what the money is for, the odds are he will go to someone he has already worked with or whom he trusts.”
Ullman finally shrugged. “Perhaps.”
Mouse stretched and yawned. “With that, I am going home to bed. I suggest you two do the same, because this fellow will require our very best.”
“You’re right. Let’s get together in the morning. Hopefully I’ll have something from the FBI by then,” Barnett said as he stood and straightened the chaotic stacks of paper on the table. After Mouse’s footsteps faded away down the hall, Barnett sat down and stared at Rachel Ullman for a few moments, knowing he needed to say something.
Without looking up, she spoke first, “All right, Agent Barnett, what is bothering you? Since you do not appear capable of saying it, permit me to try. You think I should be more polite to our Egyptian ‘ally,’ to your ‘friend.’ You think perhaps I have been too rude to our little guest.”
“We need to work together.”
“The Egyptians have their own agenda now, and that does not include being friends with us or with you.”
“Without his help, we would not even know Al-Bari is here, or that the guns and money were missing from the Embassy.”
“I do not hide my feelings and I have no intention of changing.” She leaned closer to Barnett. “To be candid, I do not like having an Arab involved in this. It was not my idea, I never agreed to it, and you can be very certain it was over my strong objections.”
“And it was not my idea to give it.”
“Wonderful… Mouse is a professional. Over the years, he and his Ambassador have done many things for us that they didn’t have to do. But don’t worry, I don’t think he likes working with you very much either.”
“You are losing sight of the key point. He is an Arab, a Muslim anyway, if you wish to split hairs. I appreciate that you have worked with him, but I have spent my career working with them at times and against them at most others. One thing I do not do, however, is trust them,” she countered sharply. “I suggest you do the same.”
“He has access to information neither you nor we can get, and his cultural background just might allow him to get inside Al-Bari’s head.”
“Agent Barnett, you were an Army Ranger with an excellent record in the mechanized infantry in Iraq. More recently you have held a number of positions with your FBI.” She paused as Barnett looked at her. “We do our homework, and I would be shocked if you had not done yours just as thoroughly.”
“Well, Colonel or Officer Ullman —which are you. By the way, is it Army or Mossad?”
“We are a small country. The distinction rarely matters.”
Aim True, My Brothers Page 14
