Prepared For Rage

by Dana Stabenow

"Two, before Isa made our informant."

  "Made him, did he? What'd he do to him?"

  "Started a riot, and then threw him into the advancing line of riot police."

  "No shit. Guy's got style, gotta give him that."

  Chisum said nothing.

  "Our snitch must have survived," Kallendorf said.

  "Must have," Chisum said dryly. He sat back down. "According to him, the two recruits were young Muslim men, both German-born of immigrant Lebanese parents, both with degrees in engineering."

  "What the hell is it with al Qaeda and engineering degrees? You'd think they wouldn't let you into the gang without one."

  Chisum shrugged. "It's probably a lot like anything else. It's not what you know, it's who."

  "What did they say about Isa?"

  "Everyone we spoke to described Isa as a quiet man who socialized primarily in the coffeehouses with men his own age or younger."

  "He gay?"

  "Hasn't been any rumor of that so far. His boss says he was a reliable and competent if undistinguished employee."

  "No proselytizing in the workplace, eh?"

  "No, sir."

  "We got any idea of what he's planning?"

  "We know he's been bouncing money from bank accounts in Switzerland to all over Europe, both the Americas, and the Caribbean. I think Hong Kong, too, although the Chinese are even cagier than the Swiss about giving up information."

  "Okay, mostly Western banks, then probably a Western target."

  "Considering that, and considering also that we know Isa went to school in the West, and that both of his German recruits are fluent in English, yes, sir."

  "So either us or the Brits."

  "Yes."

  "You talked to them?"

  "MI5? Frequentiy."

  "Talk to 'em some more. Any line on these recruits?"

  "Yussuf al-Dagma and Yaqub Sadiq. They vanished from Dusseldorf the same day Isa did. We talked to their families, their friends, their coworkers. Only Yussuf al-Dagma's family had met Isa, who was at that time using the name Dandin Gandhi."

  "Gandhi," Kallendorf said. "First Jesus, and now Gandhi. This guy got a martyr complex or what?"

  "Yes, sir. Their description matches the few eyewitness descriptions we have."

  "They were cooperative?"

  "I'm told they are very worried about their son. The family has become pretty acculturated, and reasonably secular. They said that al-Dagma has been obsessing over Israel and Iraq, and that two years ago he started going to the mosque. We talked to the local imam, who was very cagey, but our people on the ground say he's been doing a little inciting to riot on the side."

  "What was this riot about?"

  "Nothing to do with the imam, not this time. Someone tipped off the local cops that there was a terrorist cell meeting regularly at a coffee shop frequented by young Muslim men. The informant who was trying to get close to Isa, once he was up and moving around again, did a little investigating and found out that Yaqub Sadiq had been sleeping with a married woman, also Muslim. As I'm sure you know, that's a beheading offense under Islamic law. The agent thinks the husband made an anonymous call."

  " 'Hello, 911? This guy is banging my wife, so come on down and arrest all these bin Ladenites hanging out at the local Starbucks where my wife's lover buys his cappuccino'?"

  "Uh, essentially, yes, sir."

  "And they bought that?"

  "I don't believe he mentioned his wife's lover, sir," Patrick said in a wooden voice. "We are at present speculating as to the exact occurrence of events."

  "Holy shit," the director said, unheeding. "The Germans must hire their cops from the lowest common denominator up."

  "Yes, sir," Patrick said. He was determined to cling to his point, no matter how difficult Kallendorf made it. "This could be good news for us, however."

  "What, that German cops are simpletons?"

  "No, sir. If Sadiq joined Isa's group as a means of escaping the consequences of sleeping with someone else's wife, it means that he may not be a true believer, he may just have wanted to get out of Dodge. If that's so, and if I can find him, we may have a way in."

  "Any luck with that?"

  "We canvassed the airport and the train stations with photos of the two. Nothing yet. They must have driven out of town, flown out of somewhere else. We're working with Interpol on that, but…" Chisum shrugged. "It was six months ago, and most airport rentacops can't remember who they screened in the last five minutes. And Isa never leaves much of a trail. He's patient, and he's cunning. I've got head shots of the recruits and I've distributed them to the heads of security in every American, Canadian, and Mexican airport, FBI, Interpol, and of course agency-wide. We're looking. It's only a matter of time before we find them."

  "And when we find them, we find Isa?"

  Chisum battled with temptation, and won. "That's not a given, sir. He communicates almost exclusively by email, at least after the initial recruitment. If he continues operating the way he operated in Baghdad, he will recruit them, work out a plan for them, and then he'll cut them loose except for email contact." He diverted from a lifelong self-imposed tact and discretion for a moment to say bitterly, "Son of a bitch won't even use a cell phone."

  "I don't blame him," Kallendorf said, "have you looked at the sigint center lately? You could lock yourself into a safe with four-foot-thick walls and drop the safe into a thousand feet of water and they could still hear you whisper sweet nothings into that cute little blond secretary's ears. What's her name? Melissa?"

  "Melanie."

  "Melanie, that's right. Always smells so good. Love that in a woman." Silence. "Will he stop at two recruits?"

  "No, sir. The average al Qaeda cell isn't large, but it's usually around ten or twelve people."

  "Looking for more of the same?"

  "Yes, sir. Young disaffected Muslim men, middle or even upper middle class, well-educated, often unemployed but not always. The preference is for unmarried but it's not a requirement. Most of them are pretty homely, too, which I think is deliberate."

  "Can't get a girl, so give them a bomb instead?"

  "Freud would be proud of you, sir."

  Fortunately for Patrick, Kallendorf didn't hear that last remark. "And this Isa is the only al Qaeda contact the others will meet."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Cut off the head, the snake dies."

  "With al Qaeda it's more like a hydra than a snake, sir."

  "Huh. Hydra. Good one. I'll have to remember that. Yeah. All right, Patrick, carry on. But I want some hard data on this asshole soonest, and I want his ass in the bag sooner than that." Click.

  Chisum replaced the receiver carefully back in its cradle.

  The door opened and he looked up. "Everything all right with the director?" Melanie said.

  "Everything's just fine," Chisum said.

  "Anything you need to run up to his office, you just ask."

  "Thank you, Melanie," he said.

  "I was just going down the hall for some coffee," she said. "Would you like some, Mr. Chisum?"

  "I would, thank you, Melanie."

  "Be right back, then." She smiled and closed the door gently behind her.

  It might have been the first time he wished he'd gone for the director's job. It wouldn't be the last.

  9

  HOUSTON, AUGUST 2007

  "Why me?" Kenai said. It was more of a demand than a question, but at least then no one could accuse her of whining. "Why not Bill, or Mike?"

  "Thanks a bunch, there, Kenai," Mike said.

  "He's a Muslim, Rick," Kenai said, keeping her eyes on their commander. He was the one who had to be convinced. "He's not going to like having a woman for a babysitter. Think of how it'll play back home, a woman, an inferior instructing him. They'll see it on television every night, and he'll know it. He's not going to like it."

  Her voice ended on something perilously close to a plea. Rick, leaning against a desk, his arms folded, frowned at
the floor and said nothing. The rest of the Carnivore Crew watched and waited. There was no effort, individually or together, to take her part. She couldn't find it in her heart to blame them. None of them wanted to be the babysitter, either.

  "It's your first time on orbit, too," Joel said in a tone that brooked no argument. "You'll know what to keep him away from."

  "How about we keep him away from the shuttle altogether?" Laurel said brightly.

  Joel pretended he hadn't heard her. He consulted the omnipresent clipboard. "I think that's all for today. Press conference on Monday, don't forget, clean flight suits all around."

  The door closed behind him. "Nice try, Nanook," Laurel said.

  "But no cigar," Mike Williams said.

  Kenai gave a half-hearted shrug. "Worth the effort. I thought maybe when he didn't show for the Vomit Comet training in March…" Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head.

  Rick looked up. "Somebody's got to wet-nurse him, Kenai. Sorry you drew the short straw."

  There was an almost imperceptible relaxation of tension around the room. That was that. "Okay," Kenai said, dismissing the sheik for more important matters, "you've all got the updates on the robot arm modifications? Good. It'll add about twenty minutes to each deployment, a small price to pay for the increase in sensitivity. She's handling like something out of Robert Heinlein now anyway."

  "Unless you're the one EVA, holding on to five thousand pounds of satellite with your fingertips," Mike pointed out.

  "Bitch, bitch, bitch," Bill said. "You'd kill anyone who tried to take the job away from you, Gator."

  Bill had a predilection for nicknames, and he'd called Kenai Nanook from the first day he met her, since she was from Alaska and "nanook" was the local word for polar bear. Mike was from Florida and he had a long, wide, flat nose that naturally led to Bill calling him Alligator. When the secretaries over at admin got to hear of it, they were the Carnivore Crew from that day forward. After that, the deluge. Now Laurel from California was Condor, Rick from Washington State was Killer Whale, Killer for short, and Bill from Minnesota was Wolverine, partly because he was from Minnesota but mostly because he was a huge X-Men fan. It didn't hurt that he looked a little like Hugh Jackman, only black.

  A week later, the sheik in question arrived for an introductory visit. He looked like Disney's Aladdin, only older and more arrogant, and from the first he proved to be labor intensive. Kenai was right, he wasn't happy with a woman as his partner, and he said so. Joel, to his credit, ignored his hints that someone of the sheik's stature in the Islamic community and his family connections and their immense wealth and political profile and blah blah blah really ought to be taken in tow by the mission's commander. The director of flight operations nipped that suggestion in the bud immediately.

  Joel was probably afraid of what Rick would do to him if he did, for good reason. Rick did not suffer fools gladly, and people who inflicted fools upon him had been known to rue the day, if not resign on the spot.

  The sheik had various other concerns, usually delivered to Kenai in an imperious voice as he looked down his very long nose. For one thing, he had seen photos of previous crews in space and he'd noticed that often the crew was wearing shorts. He trusted Kenai would not be orbiting the earth half-naked.

  Kenai exchanged a glance with Laurel, who happened to be loitering within earshot. "I'm sorry, sir, I just assumed…"

  "Assumed what?" the sheik said loftily.

  "That you had been briefed." She did her best to look as if she were reluctant to be the one to bring him the bad news. "This mission…"

  His brow puckered. "Yes?"

  "Well, sir, this mission will be accomplished totally in the nude."

  If Laurel hadn't burst out laughing he might have taken this horror straight to Joel, but as it was he didn't speak directly to Kenai for three days, which at least proved he wasn't entirely stupid.

  But it was yet another unwanted distraction in the now only eleven months leading up to launch. Kenai gritted her teeth and tried to be more accessible to the royal pain in the ass. She grudged the valuable chunks of time he ate up, but it was better for her to intercept any further problems before they got to the commander.

  And let's face it, Bill was right, she would have killed anyone who tried to take the job from her. There was nothing, no irritation she would not suffer to pass that magic mile marker of fifty miles up that would turn her silver astronaut pin to gold and make her a bona fide astronaut.

  Flight was all she had ever wanted, from the moment she was four when her father had lifted her into his lap, put her hands on the stick of his Cessna 172, and performed a simple right bank. She'd agitated for a shot at the right seat from the time she was eight, but her father wouldn't let her try until her feet reached the pedals without assistance.

  She had almost a hundred hours in dual before she had her license, which she got the day she turned sixteen, a full six months before she bothered to get her driver's license. She only got around to getting her driver's license because she got tired of waiting on rides to the airport.

  She graduated from high school a year early and seven years later was out the other side of a BA in English-she'd always liked to read, and she'd noticed that the ability to write simple declarative sentences was a serious asset in the world of aviation, especially when dealing with the FAA-and an MS in electrical engineering. By the time she was a sophomore in college she was qualified to fly commercial and put herself through school flying Twin Otters and then Beechcraft 1900 for Era Aviation between Homer and Anchorage on weekends. Upon graduation she went to work for Boeing in systems design. Shortly thereafter she was test-flying jets right off the drafting table, in between times taking her doctorate, also in electrical engineering. Her doctoral thesis was an overview of the evolution of electrical systems during the design and operation of the space shuttle, and ended with the proposal of a radical new design for the next generation of manned space flight vehicles that was energy efficient without reducing power. It was well written and relatively easy even for a layman to understand. It was what got her the job offer from NASA.

  The goal had always been to fly in space. With no apology and no regrets, she figured she'd read too much Heinlein at an impressionable age and never recovered. It wasn't that they didn't know better now, no Venusian dragons or three-legged Martians, but the knowledge did not quench her thirst to go see with her own eyes.

  It was an all-consuming passion, one that had cost her two good men and many more friends. She didn't regret the loss. The lovers and the friends wanted too much of her time, time taken away from the left seat. Cal wasn't the only man she'd ever been with who understood that, but he was the only one who was, so far, willing to accept it as part of the price of her companionship.

  It was also the Challenger. It wasn't something she talked about a lot because the few times she had she'd received some very odd looks. It wasn't that she wanted to ride a rocket and have it explode beneath her. She didn't suffer from a death wish, she had every intention of living to be as old as she possibly could and then tack on another twenty-five years to read all the books she'd missed when she'd been focused on technical manuals. It was that the Challenger had left shoes to fill, and her feet itched to step into them.

  Her father had been all for her applying to the astronaut program. Her mother, a stay-at-home mom, had never quite forgiven her for embracing such a dangerous occupation, especially since she was an only child, but she loved Kenai and supported her nevertheless. She had no family distractions, and after her two abortive attempts at romance no relationship distractions, either.

  Sometimes she worried a little that she was turning into a drone. But mostly she was excited and challenged by her profession, a siren song that lured her, enticed her, charmed her, enslaved her. Call it the call to adventure. The Power of Myth had been assigned reading in her modern lit class. She'd liked it well enough, but one thing she had never understood, either in the text or i
n any of the subsequent novels they read and applied it to, and that was the hero's refusal of the call. She could not conceive of a day when adventure called and she wasn't the first to step up to answer.

  Although the month Sheik Jilal al-Hussein spent with the Carnivore Crew did test her resolve. He seemed to take space travel as his birthright, a privilege that required no reciprocal sweat equity. He was by turns dismissive, contemptuous, and downright rude, and always and ever arrogant. He questioned everything, from the shuttle emergency escape procedures to how to work the toilet, which, to be fair, was a procedure that tested them all. He demanded a list of the food items that went into their on-orbit menu, searching the ingredients for pork products, and he looked mutinous at the news that he would have to hang his sleep sack mere feet away from two female infidels, neither of whom were his wives.

  The less said about his delayed ride on the Vomit Comet, the better. He refused to go on a second, for which the test director of the Reduced Gravity Program sent the Carnivore Crew his profound thanks.

  "The Reduced Gravity Program?" Cal said, grinning.

  "NASA-speak for riding simulated weightlessness maneuvers in the KC-135."

  "At which the sheik did not perform well?"

  "At which the sheik outpuked Barfin' Jake Garn. We v/ere all kinda hoping he'd make himself too sick to ride. If he's that seasick on orbit, it's going to be seriously uncomfortable for all of us, even Rick, who's been up twice and never been sick."

  Cal understood. In rough weather on Munro, all it took was the smell of one seasick crewman to infect his entire berthing area. "Who picked this guy anyway?" Cal said.

  "We're launching his company's satellite." Kenai's voice was muffled, speaking as she was from a prone position on the sand. Cal was anointing her back with sunscreen, paying deliberate attention to every square inch of exposed flesh. Every now and then she let out an appreciative groan.

  Munro was at the dock in Miami under Taffy's watchful eye. They had both managed to wedge a free weekend into their schedules, and Cal 's father had a friend whose brother-in-law knew someone who owned a luxury condo on South Padre Island who was more than happy to loan it to the senator's son for a weekend. Probably there was a legislative trade-off involved but that was his father's business and the less Cal knew about it the better. At any rate it was the end of the month, almost the end of the season, and the beach was almost deserted.