"Have you ever seen a launch, Cal?"
"No, I'm ashamed to say I haven't, Doreen, except on television," Cal said. "I'm looking forward to it."
"How close will we be?"
"How close? Well," Cal said, sitting back and steepling his fingers in an exaggeratedly pontifical gesture, "we are going to have media on board for this launch and, I'm told, at least one admiral. And then there's you. The Coast Guard is, shall we say, very excited about the public relations opportunity inherent in having you on board a Coast Guard cutter to watch your daughter go into space, all three of you descendants of the only Coastie to have been awarded the Medal of Honor."
"Relatives, not descendants," Nick said.
"Whatever," Cal said. He dropped the steeple and grinned. "All this together means we get to go in a lot closer than the OSC ordinarily does."
"Which means?" Doreen said.
"I aim to take us in as close as we can get without running aground. You'll have a front-row seat. Our BMC-bosun's mate chief, basically our chief navigator-is looking at the charts right now."
"When we said we'd do this, the man at NASA told us it wouldn't be as exciting as being on the grandstand."
"Distances over water are very deceiving," Cal said. "It will feel much closer than that. The sound of it will get to us a few moments after the fact, but that's true onshore as well."
"How many reporters will be on board?" Doreen said. "I do hate it when they shove microphones in my face and ask me how I feel about my only child being an astronaut."
"There were plenty of times when you wanted to launch her into orbit yourself," Nick said.
"Back when she was a teenager," Doreen said indignantly, over their laughter, "and every mother wants to launch her daughter into orbit at some point during adolescence." She reflected. "She was very stubborn."
"She still is," Nick said. "How else could she put up with the Arabian Knight?"
"The Arabian Knight?" the XO said, who had just joined them.
"The part-timer," Cal said without thinking. "The playboy sheik from Qatar who gets a ride-along on this shuttle courtesy of the satellite NASA is launching for his family business, otherwise known as Al Jazeera. The mission commander has landed Kenai with the job of babysitting him."
There was a startled silence, and he looked up from his mug to find them all staring at him. His words, he realized too late, had just ousted their relationship. "Or so I read in the newspaper," he said weakly.
"Are there any of those gorgeous snickerdoodles left?" Doreen said, leaning forward and smiling at the XO.
Into this awkward silence Lieutenant Noyes opened the door of the wardroom. He looked around until he found Nick. Target acquired, he smiled. He was a friendly soul, well-liked by the crew, something that could be said of only a very few aviators. The aviator-sailor relationship was competitive and all too often antagonistic, but Noyes was one of the good guys. "Mr. Munro," Noyes said now, "would you like a walk-around of the helo before you turn in? Give you an advance look at what you're letting yourself in for when you go flying with us." He grinned. "Might want to back out after. We're just a bunch of knuckle-draggers down in the AvDet."
"Love to, Lieutenant, but please, call me Nick."
The lieutenant smiled at Doreen. "It's a nice night, Mrs. Munro, beautiful view of the Miami skyline."
Not wholly impervious to his charm, Doreen shook her head. "Thank you, Lieutenant, but it was a long flight. I'm going to turn in."
Later, when the wardroom's other mess cook, one Seaman Crane, had been summoned to escort Doreen to the junior officers' stateroom that had been vacated for the Munros, the XO looked at Cal.
"Don't," Cal said.
"You're dating an astronaut?"
"Shut up," Cal said.
"You're dating an astronaut."
"I mean it, XO, put a lid on it, right now."
"I've always dreamed I could fly," the XO said, hand pressed to his heart.
"Good night, XO."
"Good night, Captain, and very sweet dreams."
Cal flipped him off over his shoulder, and heard Taffy laugh as he headed up to his stateroom.
19
MIAMI
Mrs. Mansour's face was drawn with grief, but her voice was steady and she spoke with clarity and determination. She identified Adam Bayzani's doctored passport photo as that of Daoud Sadat, the man who had rented her spare room for the last six months, although she didn't think much of the likeness, saying the individual features seemed exaggerated.
"Exaggerated how?" Patrick said. "It would help if you could be a bit more specific. Take your time."
She did, studying the likeness of a man who she believed had murdered her only child. After a bit she said, "His forehead might be a little too broad in the photograph. His was more narrow, I think. The ears and nose are too long, too, and the mouth a little too wide. It's almost-"
"What?" Patrick said when she hesitated. "Almost what?"
"It's as if someone smeared the photograph when it was still wet." She raised a hand in a helpless gesture. "That's all."
"It's a lot, Mrs. Mansour, believe me."
"Will it help you find him?"
"Yes, Mrs. Mansour," he said. "It will help us find him."
"And he will be punished?"
He held her fierce gaze, his own steady and unflinching, even though he knew he was making promises he might very well be unable to keep. "He will. I give you my word."
She detailed as much of Sadat's activities as she knew, sitting at the utilitarian metal table in one of two metal folding chairs, in the bare, grubby little room with the single overhead light, loaned to Patrick for the occasion by the Miami Dade Police Department. Sadat, she said, left the house for work every morning Monday through Friday, and returned each evening just after six. Work where? Lockheed, he had told her.
Patrick dispatched a team to Lockheed.
It was odd, she said, that all of Sadat's clothes had been new when he arrived at her house.
"How could you tell?" Patrick said.
She looked at him. "I work at a dry cleaner's," she said. "They were new."
"All right," he said.
"It seemed odd," she said again, "but it wasn't until later that I realized it might be because he was putting on a new identity with the new clothes."
Sadat, she said, appeared to have little or no social life. Outside of work hours, he spent little time out, at least at first-her lips tightened-and no friends had visited him at her home. He declared the intention of visiting various local sights: the Everglades, Miami Beach, a carnival, the zoo. He had invited the two of them to accompany him to some of these, as a way, he said, of repaying them for their kindness.
She couldn't be sure then, but now she was certain that Zahirah had begun meeting Sadat outside the home. Mrs. Mansour didn't drive so she hadn't been able to follow him anywhere even if she'd wanted to, although she had become increasingly uneasy when she saw how close her daughter and Mr. Sadat were getting.
"Was it," Patrick said delicately, not wanting to offend her, "a romantic relationship?"
For the first time her eyes teared up. "I believe my daughter thought it was."
"And Mr. Sadat?"
She had to think about that for a while, so long that Patrick had to give her a nudge. "Mrs. Mansour?"
She came back from wherever she'd gone and refocused on his face. "I think," she said very carefully indeed, "that Mr. Sadat cared more than he knew."
"Why would you say that?"
"Because he killed her," she said, her voice hard. "He could have just left her, walked away and never contacted her again. Instead, he killed her."
There was a brief, fraught silence. "I'm sorry," Patrick said in a gentle voice, "I don't quite-"
"He killed her so that there would be no temptation for him to return," she said, still in that hard voice, her eyes bright but not with tears. "I'm not a fool, Mr. Chisum. You are a federal agent. You would not b
e here if you did not have good cause to suspect Mr. Sadat of wrongdoing. And when you arrive with as much help as I saw in the lobby, I don't imagine you're looking for him because he's been forging checks or bilking widows out of their pensions."
She raised an eyebrow.
"No," he said.
"No," she said, agreeing with him. "You suspect him of being a terrorist. He must be very good at what he does or you would have apprehended him by now."
"Yes," Patrick said. At this point he saw no reason to lie to her.
"If he cared for my daughter, it would be a great temptation to him to return here for her after he accomplishes whatever horror he is planning. If he has succeeded in escaping your notice for this long, then he had to have known that returning here would have been a fatal mistake. Therefore, he removed that temptation."
He looked at her with respect. She'd have made a good profiler. "Tell me, Mrs. Mansour, how did you know he wasn't Egyptian?"
"His accent was Paki," she said. "He insisted on speaking English, he said the better for all of us to practice so we fit in to our new country. I think it was so he wouldn't give his true nationality away while speaking in Arabic. But he did slip on occasion. We all do. He was Pakistani, not Egyptian. I'm sure of it."
LATER, IN HIS HOTEL ROOM, PATRICK SHOWERED AND WRAPPED HIMSELF in the terry-cloth robe he found hanging in the closet. He turned on the television and flicked through the channels. More bombings and kidnappings in Iraq. Gaza had changed hands, again. Yet another helicopter had been shot down in Afghanistan, and in Islamabad there were demonstrations against Musharraf. Gutsy of them, although ever since Musharraf had taken to wearing business suits instead of an army uniform, and had had his photograph taken in one standing next to George Bush, he'd been a little less inclined to stomp on the opposition with tanks.
In Paris there had been a race riot involving Muslim expatriates; in Kuwait, Iran, and Qatar there were demonstrations for women's suffrage; and in Indonesia a plane had crashed into the Indian Ocean, killing all 102 people on board.
He clicked around a while longer, stopping at something called NTV. It took him a few moments to realize that this stood for NASA TV, replaying direct feeds from the space station and rerunning videos from shuttle launches going back a dozen years. Only in Florida. The channel came to rest on a long shot of the shuttle standing at the gantry, brave and white against the dark night sky. He muted the sound, pulled a chair up so he could prop his feet on the bed, and pulled his notes up on his laptop.
His phone rang. It was Melanie. "What are you doing still at work, Melanie?" he said, checking the clock. "You should have gone home hours ago."
"I thought I should wait until I heard from you," she said, her low contralto a pleasant sound. "In case you needed something."
"Thank you, Melanie," he said, a little touched. "No, there's nothing. Except-"
"Yes, Mr. Chisum?"
"What time is it in London?" He checked the clock again.
"It's five a.m. in London, Mr. Chisum."
"Okay," he said. "Do me a favor, call the Knightsbridge Institute and leave a message for Hugh Rincon when he comes in, will you? Ask him to call my cell phone number."
"As good as done. Anything else?"
"Has the director asked for me today?"
"No, sir. We haven't heard from the director since he went on vacation last Friday."
"Good," Patrick said with satisfaction. "Okay, thanks, Melanie. You can wrap it up now and head for home." He hesitated. "I wish I could tell you to take the morning off, but chances are I'm going to need you at your desk tomorrow. I'm sorry."
"It's quite all right, Mr. Chisum," she said, and he could have sworn he heard a smile in her voice. "This is important stuff. I'm happy to help out."
The warmth in her voice was unmistakable. He stammered some reply and fumbled the phone into its cradle, and sat staring at it for several minutes afterward. It had been so long since he'd experienced even a mild flirtation that he was uncertain as to what was going on here. Rumor had it she was sleeping with Kallendorf. If rumor was correct, she might be coming on to him at Kallendorf's suggestion.
If rumor was incorrect, she might be coming on to him for herself.
He shook himself like a dog coming out of the water. An improbable assumption. Just look at him, the budding potbelly, the dying hairline. It was written down somewhere that you never slept with anyone prettier than you. But he couldn't help feeling wistful. If only it were true.
His evil twin whispered, Even if it isn't true, how far would Melanie be prepared to go to get information out of you?
He immediately condemned his evil twin to silence and returned resolutely to his laptop, stubbornly determined to resolve the mystery that was Isa, and do it before Isa struck again, this time, Patrick was convinced, entirely too close to home.
Isa, who had apprenticed with Zarqawi.
Isa, who blew up a busload of people in Baghdad as a means of presenting a calling card to the Far Enemy.
Isa, who recruited acolytes in Germany and England and moved them across oceans like chess pieces.
Isa, who used the Internet as his front office while totally frustrating the best geeks, nerds, and techies the CIA had in house to trace him.
Isa, who it was reputed never bowed five times a day toward Mecca.
Isa, who seduced young men away from their families and their societies to become suicide bombers and mass murderers in the name of Allah.
Isa, who had almost certainly killed Adam Bayzani and Zahirah Man-sour.
Isa, who wasn't Jordanian or Egyptian, but who might be Afghani, or even Pakistani.
Isa. Where was he, and what was he up to?
20
CAPE CANAVERAL
"How's the weather look?"
They all waited tensely for the answer. The NASA meteorologist, aware that this was his moment in the sun, paged through a sheaf of papers and took his time answering, probably partly because his answer was so prosaic. It wasn't anything they couldn't all have looked up on www.weather .com five minutes before, anyway, and he knew it. "Forecast for midnight is for clear skies and calm winds, continuing through morning. Winds will pick up a little around eleven, but you'll be long gone by then, so no worries."
There was an audible exhalation around the room. "Excellent," Rick said. He looked around at the rest of the crew. "Any concerns? Anyone?" He carefully avoided looking at the Arabian Knight, who put his hand up anyway. "Mike?"
Mike shrugged, the epitome of the cool jet jockey. "Let's light this candle." He spoiled the effect with an enormous grin.
Bill shook his head.
" Laurel?"
Laurel 's brow was creased but then Laurel 's brow was always creased. "Eratosthenes and ARABSAT-8A good to go." No one saw her crossing her fingers behind her back but during launch crossed fingers were a given. "We should be good to go when we get on orbit."
"Kenai?"
"All systems go. Robot arm go." Kenai heard the words coming out of her mouth but they echoed strangely in her ears. This time tomorrow she'd be on orbit. This time tomorrow she'd look out of the flight deck windows and see the Big Blue Marble. This time tomorrow, she would have the right to change the silver shuttle on her collar for gold. "We're ready to rock and roll."
This time tomorrow she would be a bona fide astronaut.
The Arabian Knight still had his hand up. Rick sighed heavily. "Yes,
Jilal?"
"Yes, Commander." The Arabian Knight never addressed them by their names. He had not been invited to. "I had a few more questions about the food. I want be certain that everything is halal-"
Kenai tuned out of the conversation. That evening, she got a phone call from Cal. "I thought you were at sea."
"We're only five miles offshore. I figured I'd see if my cell phone was working. I dialed the number you gave me, and whiz bang, some guy answered and handed me off to you." There was a faint question at the end of his sentence.
> "Yeah, that was Mike. Mike Smith. One of the other crew members. We're in crew quarters. You remember, in medical quarantine until we go out to the pad."
"Yeah."
After a moment she said, "So did you call just to hear me breathe?"
He surprised them both when he said, "Yeah. I think I did."
Neither one of them knew what to do with that, so she said, "You've met the parents?"
"They're great people, Kenai."
She smiled. "I know. They seem equally impressed with you. I talked to them before you left the dock." She yawned. "Dad wants to know if I'm sleeping with you."
"Oh," he said uncomfortably. "Yeah. I kinda blew it."
"He told me."
"Sorry," he said.
"I'm not," she said. "Are you?"
For the life of him, he couldn't come up with a respectable answer, probably because he didn't know what it was.
"Never mind," she said. "Let's not go there, at least not now. I've got other things to worry about."
"How's the Arabian Knight?"
"Right now, he's vetting the menu. Making sure everything's halal."
"What's halal?"
"It's Arabic for kosher, I think. Whatever. It keeps him out of our hair. Now if we could just gag him for the rest of the trip when we strap in."
"There have been protests about him."
"Yeah, they told us. Bunch of right-wing Muslims protesting a devout's close contact with secular infidels?"
"Pretty much."
"Do we got trouble in River City?"
"Nah. For one thing, the launch is miles away from anything that looks like access. I suppose they could barricade the gates or something, but what would be the point?"
"And that's not what they want, anyway," she said cynically. "What they want is film at eleven."
"Speaking of which-"
"Oh yeah," she said, and laughed. "I forgot. How many television cameras you got on board?"
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