by Michael Ryan
“Not funny,” I said.
“Oh, you are such a Guy guy about this car,” she said, affectionately.
We stopped at a guardhouse next to an electronic ten-foot gate with thick steel bars you couldn’t drive through with a tank. The guard somehow recognized Angela in her hijab and he wrote down my information on a log-in sheet and asked me to sign it and told us to drive to Sheed’s plane, which was waiting for us on the apron with its motors running.
The gate slid open and we drove inside and it closed behind us. Sheed’s plane? What was Angela’s connection to Sheed? I guessed I was about to find out. We drove past a few hangars and rows of parked puddle-jumpers and weekenders, two- and four-seaters with no bathroom and under 500-mile fuel capacity, which didn’t rate inside parking. The low-rollers: a mere million or less. How humiliating for them.
“So we’re flying in Sheed’s plane?” I asked Angela. “Why not Frank Sinatra’s?”
“I don’t think you’ll be disappointed,” she answered. “There it is.”
A one-hundred-foot-long jet was sitting in front of us with boarding stairs leading to its open door. It had thirteen porthole windows on each side. (I counted them.)
“Are we transporting a battalion?” I asked.
“I think it’s just us,” Angela answered. “If Folsom’s coming along, he’ll be on board. Stop the car here.”
I did and we got out of the car and the valet appeared out of nowhere and handed me a little yellow ticket stub. I did a double take. It was the same guy who parked cars in front of Sheed’s office.
“Buenos noches, señor,” he said, merrily emphasizing the noches.
“You’re working late,” I said.
“My wife likes to have babies,” he said. “The babies like to eat.”
“Well, I’m not going to lose this baby,” I said, holding up the ticket stub.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he answered.
I walked up to the front of my car, embraced the left fender, and kissed it tenderly good-bye—for Angela’s benefit, although the valet laughed as well.
“I will take good care of your beloved,” he said.
“His beloved. You’ve got that right,” Angela said to the valet.
I popped the hatchback and pulled out my suitcase yet again and rolled it behind me to the plane.
“I wonder if James Bond rolled an overnight bag behind him on dangerous missions,” I said to Angela when I caught up to her.
“James Bond is an asshole,” Angela said.
“Gee, I always thought he was super cool,” I said to irk her, deliberately bouncing my suitcase up the boarding stairs.
The plane inside did not have thirteen rows of seats, or any rows of seats for that matter. It looked like the preferred customer lounge in a Las Vegas casino. Everything was beige—dark beige carpet, light beige suede walls and ceiling, deep beige leather armchairs and sofas arranged around coffee tables and facing big-screen TVs. The only thing missing were hostesses in strapless French maid outfits and fishnet stockings ferrying cocktails on little silver trays. Sheed was sitting at a table for four covered by a white linen tablecloth eating a steak and drinking a glass of red wine.
“Won’t you join me, Mr. Wilder?” he asked, without saying hello, apparently expecting me. “Georges would be happy to fry you up a steak.” He pronounced “Georges” in flawless French and “fry you up a steak” with a country boy twang.
I shook my head no. Fear takes away my appetite.
“How about you, Angela? There’s also sea bass caught this afternoon and a nice Montrachet to go with it.”
“That sounds perfect,” Angela said. She undid two Velcro strips at her neck and off went the head scarf and robe. Underneath she was wearing jeans and a white dress shirt. Hanging from a waist-length strap under her collar was a big black machine pistol. She bent her neck and looped the strap over her head and dropped the gun into a chair, then sat down next to Sheed as if she had done nothing unusual whatsoever.
The pistol had a separate handle and magazine, so it could be fired with one hand or two, one of those assault weapons used by mass murderers and SWAT teams and SEALs in close combat. I had never seen one before except in movies. The real thing was nasty. It looked like carnage incarnate, bodies piled and blood pooled so thick you’d slip on it. Angela and Sheed both noticed me staring at the gun.
“That’s another reason I was wearing the robe,” she said to me. “I didn’t want to alarm you.”
“It certainly would have,” I said. “It certainly does.”
“We might have needed it on the ride here, but there was no sense making you any more nervous than you were,” Angela said.
So much for my acting like I wasn’t scared. No Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actor While Shitting His Pants.
Still, her remark sounded condescending, implying I’m not the man that she is. As if to answer my thought, she reached up and removed a hair net and fluffed her hair with both hands, raising her arms and pushing her shoulders back and chest forward, a female gesture that always gets my attention. I looked at her breasts and neck and face. I looked at her. Her eyes locked on mine.
“It’s still me, Robert,” she said.
“Please take a seat, Mr. Wilder,” Sheed said, motioning to the chair across from him and ignoring this exchange between Angela and me, or in any case not caring in the least about it. “You’ll find a seat belt in the chair and we’re taking off in a minute. You’re sure you’re not hungry?”
“Okay, I’ll have the steak,” I said. “But I don’t think I can eat it.”
“What are you going to do with it?” Angela asked. “Resole your shoes?”
“Not with this steak,” Sheed said. “It melts in your mouth.”
He pressed a button on an intercom. “Georges, another filet de beouf au poivre for Mr. Wilder, please,” he said. I now noticed the wine was a 1974 Chateau Margaux Margaux (about $800 a bottle). I guessed I would have a glass after all.
“Good,” Sheed said. The consummate host. He poured me $150 worth or so, and toasted Angela.
“To the most remarkable woman I know,” he said. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Wilder?”
“Could be,” I said. “I don’t know her.”
“I have never worked with anyone better at what she does,” Sheed said.
“And what does she do, Mr. Sheed?” I asked. Angela showed no visible response to our talking about her as if she weren’t present.
“I’ll let her tell you that herself,” he answered. The plane picked up speed and left the ground, the wheels clunking into place under our table. Sheed continued eating without a pause. Angela said nothing. It was as if she were deflating gently after being pumped beyond maximum pressure. Her sea bass and Montrachet appeared and she began eating, too, very slowly. I watched them enjoying their meals in silence, relaxing, savoring every flavor, clearly appreciating Georges’s talents. Obviously they felt no urgency to explain anything whatsoever to me. Maybe they planned to sit here and eat gourmet meals for the rest of their lives. When I finally spoke it seemed they had forgotten I was there.
“Not to intrude on your fine dining experience but I think you both owe me a few explanations?”
“Yes, we have a lot to talk about,” Sheed answered. “Shall we start with your questions?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve got an interesting one: Just what the fuck is going on here? I mean, I’m glad you’re enjoying your meal and all but I have no idea what you two are involved in or where we’re going or what the hell I’m doing here except for Angela’s story that someone was about to kill me.”
“ That is true,” Sheed said.
“Would you mind telling me who?”
“It’s a little complicated. I’ll have to tell you the whole story to explain it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s start at the end and go backward: where are we going?”
“Washington,” Sheed answered.
“Washington,” I repeated. “Why not? Okay, why are we going to Washington?”
“To meet with the president,” Sheed answered.
“The president,” I repeated.
“Bill Clinton,” Sheed said. “And Richard Clarke, his counterterrorism expert on the National Security Council.”
“So this is a joke, right?” I asked Angela.
“Folsom will explain everything, Robert,” she said to me. Then to Sheed, “This sea bass is delicious. And the Montrachet is wonderful.”
Sheed smiled and nodded. “Georges is a genius. It’s not a joke, Mr. Wilder,” he said without a pause or transition between the two sentences. “I work for the president and Angela works for me.”
“You work for the president and Angela works for you,” I repeated yet again.
“Correct,” Sheed said.
I glanced at Angela to see her reaction to what Sheed had told me: none whatsoever. She didn’t even look up from her fish.
Georges brought my filet de beouf au poivre and Sheed refreshed my wine. I cut the meat and put a bite in my mouth with a sip of the Margaux. It was beyond delicious. No wonder they weren’t talking while they ate. “I work for the president and Angela works for me”: Sheed had said the sentence with the intonation of “Cloudy today and rain tomorrow.” Don said Sheed had Washington connections. I realized there must be other people in the world like these two. People who did secret shit for the rich and powerful and flew on private jets and drank $800 bottles of wine. I had just never met them. Nor had I ever wanted to. And I didn’t want to now, despite the best steak and wine I ever had or was likely to have again.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s try it from the beginning instead of the end. If I have any questions I’ll ask them when you’re finished telling me the whole story.”
Sheed spoke. Angela didn’t say a word. She seemed to go into sleep mode without closing her eyes. I wondered if along with her other unusual characteristics she had developed some Yoga-master technique to control her body as she put it through what she needed it to do, which sometimes must have been beyond human limits. Two minutes into Sheed’s narrative, she got up and said, “I’m going to bed. Good night, gentlemen.” She had eaten only half her fish. She picked up her pistol and hijab like a lunchbox and coveralls after the double shift at the fertilizer plant and staggered back to the bedroom suite at the rear of the plane.
Sheed said, “She’s hardly slept for the past week and insisted on rushing to your apartment the minute she touched down from Islamabad.”
“What was she doing in Islamabad? Is that where she went from Mexico with the $200,000?”
“Eventually,” he said. “But it was a lot more money by the time she got there. We may as well start with Angela, since that’s what interests you the most.” Sheed offered me the last of the Margaux, which I declined, then he emptied the bottle into his glass, took a long swallow, and began his story.
“I met Angela when she was only eighteen years old and I was Los Angeles district attorney. As the report you read said, her father killed himself. What it didn’t say is he killed himself after her mother confessed that she was having an affair with her psychiatrist. Angela came to my office six months later, after her mother also killed herself, cruelly on Angela’s eighteenth birthday. Angela had tried to persuade her mother to report the psychiatrist—apparently very vehemently. They had been fighting about it since her father’s death. Angela believed the psychiatrist was responsible for both her parents’ deaths. Maybe he was, but I had no basis for an investigation. There was no crime committed if the affair was consensual. It’s a civil matter, not a criminal case. So entirely on her own—remember this is an eighteen-year-old just out of high school—Angela goes to the psychiatrist’s office wearing a wire pretending to be suicidal herself. For whatever reason, he was suspicious and she didn’t get anything on tape I could use. Then I received an invitation to work in Washington, and the new DA had no interest in the case.”
I pictured Angela as an eighteen-year-old freshman and tried to recall ever seeing her on the UCLA campus or anywhere else. Sheed noticed I had become distracted but didn’t try to guess why.
“Are you still with me, Mr. Wilder? As I was saying, Angela impressed me very deeply throughout the whole sordid business. Despite being devastated by what happened, she was strong, focused, and determined, remarkably so for one so young. So much so in fact that when I got to Washington I recruited her, and she’s been working for me in various capacities ever since—starting as an undergraduate at UCLA. What could be better cover? No one would suspect someone so young and looked like her—a UCLA coed, a cheerleader or homecoming queen, but not a special agent. Of course I couldn’t tell you this to explain her activities on the weekend you met her, so we invented a kidnapped brother. We needed to explain to you why you had not been an accessory to a crime, so we invented a ransom and a brother to be ransomed. The alternative was to tell you the truth, and we obviously couldn’t do that.”
“Obviously,” I said bitterly.
“Must we, Mr. Wilder?” Sheed said. “There’s not much sense in resentment at this point. In fact, we were trying not to put you at risk. Your ignorance was your protection. It served you as well as us. But now we’re in an entirely different situation, with some urgency attached. This time I want you to accompany Angela to deliver our contribution to the mujahideen we’re supporting in Afghanistan.”
I laughed out loud. “You can’t be serious, Mr. Sheed. That is the most ludicrous idea I’ve ever heard. Why would I ever do something like that? Do I look like a one-man Special Forces unit?”
“There’s no combat involved. Nor will you be going to Afghanistan but to a five-star hotel room in a Middle Eastern capital and then home. With luck, you’ll be on the ground fewer than four hours. As you must know, there are many places in the Middle East a woman can’t go without a male companion. Have you been following the news lately?”
“Not at all.”
“The Taliban are about to enter Kabul, which means they’ll control the country. Osama bin Laden, who I assume you’ve heard of, moved his headquarters from the Sudan to Afghanistan on August 18, ten days ago. He issued his ‘Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places’ and declared terrorism against the US was quote ‘a legitimate and moral obligation’ unquote. Somebody put a bomb in that trash can at the Atlanta Olympics last month killing two and wounding 111. Somebody probably shot a Stinger missile into American Flight 800 that brought it down off Long Island ten days before that. Both could have been al-Qaeda. The Khobar Towers bombing in June in Dhahran was al-Qaeda. It killed nineteen American soldiers and wounded 400 and left a fifty-foot crater where our military housing complex in Saudi Arabia had been. Things are heating up very fast. And bin Laden in Afghanistan is one hundred times as dangerous as when he was based in Sudan. We could observe him and to some extent control him there, but not in Afghanistan. It’s too unstable. It’s chaos—cities in ruins, tribe fighting tribe, drug lords and armed gangs controlling every road. There’s no infrastructure at all, much less for communication. We have zero presence there. We don’t even have people who speak the language. The Taliban is the only coherent force in the country. And our only hope is one small faction of the Taliban who still think we are their friends because we supported them for years against the Soviets. Plus they don’t want to alienate us because of our money and influence in the world community, and after they take over they will certainly want our recognition as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. This faction of the Taliban considers bin Laden a wealthy nuisance at best and an enemy at worst. They’re not in the least interested in worldwide jihad against the United States. Killing innocent people is against their version of Islam and they don’t believe bin Laden has the religious authority to declare fatwa. These are obviously the people we want to support. And we have an Afghan mujahideen we think can take out bin Laden. Putting the money in the right hands a
t the right time is crucial, and that’s what I want you to do with Angela.”
“Why me? You could get lots of male agents to accompany Angela.”
“You’re perfect. You have no profile in the intelligence community. We’re sure you’re not working secretly for anyone else. Plus we don’t have time to recruit. We need the money delivered now.”
“Who’s funding this?” I asked. “The CIA?”
“I already told you, Mr. Wilder. I work for the president.”
“Who provides the money? Who pays you? The US government?”
“No. The president. We are not a government agency. We operate entirely outside the law, but we never break the law. What we do is extralegal but not illegal.”
“So where does the money come from?”
“Let me just call them ‘Friends of Bill,’ ” Sheed said, smiling. “Donors. What we do is always consonant with US interests, as well as in the president’s interest.”
“Political interest?” I asked.
“Certainly that,” Sheed answered. “But more generally that he thrive and do well.”
“Do well in the polls,” I said.
“Of course. But it also may not surprise you to learn that there are powerful people in Washington who prefer that Bill Clinton not thrive and do well. We’re only two months from the election, are we not?”
“Against Dole and Perot, two geriatric crankbuckets,” I said. “Dole has one expression: irritated. He’s like your grumpy grandpa with a bad case of hemorrhoids. And Perot is a certified nutcase. Clinton is creaming them in the polls. It’ll be a landslide.”
“Right. If nothing happens.”
“What could happen?” I asked.
“What if the American people felt the president wasn’t protecting them against terrorism? What if there was a huge terrorist incident right before the election? What if there was a series of them?”
“Is there going to be?”
“We’re trying to make sure there isn’t. Now let me ask you a question. Politically, whose interest would it serve if there were?”
