Abejide screamed and jumped down from the fence rail. She grabbed the first person within reach, pointing and pushing at him to look. “The mayor!” she shouted. He hurried to the fallen woman and several other people followed him. By the time the security guard looked up he had three or four faces gathered around the tragic figure. Abejide was not one of them.
Still acting for the cameras, she looked around wildly, holding her shoulder bag with one hand, the crossbow hidden between her hand and the strap. She put her hand to her face as if calling again for a missing person, then gave up in desperation and ran from the plaza, south to Dolorosa, where an SUV had just pulled up to the curb. Abejide never looked at it, only kept running straight past the courthouse. Several turns and backtracks later, she headed for the appointed location to meet with the pretzel vendor’s contacts. The world of sound came back to her, but all it contained was distant sirens.
CHAPTER NINE
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Five hours later the upstairs room at the JIB was still quietly buzzing with coordination efforts, but everyone was despondent. Twelve people had died on Main Plaza, including a ten-year-old who had played guitar for the mariachi band slated to perform. A further twenty-two were wounded, some now in critical condition at the hospital. San Antonio’s citizens, unable to access the plaza or the cathedral because of police cordons, were creating a memorial for their young mayor on the lawn of City Hall, filling it with flowers, candles, photographs, and handwritten notes and prayers. The lawn was fairly small, so the memorial was spilling all the way around the white stone building, and mourners unwilling to go home were sitting on their parked cars on every block nearby. On the plaza, someone had turned off the lights on the big Christmas tree.
Jonathan Harper could not have taken it harder if he had lost someone personally. The deputy director sat with his chin propped on three fingers of his hand, watching the videos, photos, and reports roll in. He had devoted one laptop screen to coverage of the growing memorial. Kealey could see by how rigidly he held his neck that he was raging inside at the nearest target: himself.
“Jon,” Kealey said quietly, “you know if you’d warned them earlier, any safety precautions they would have taken still wouldn’t have mattered. They couldn’t have closed down streets without information that we didn’t have. They wouldn’t have checked cars for bombs without clear evidence pointing that way. They could have limited entry and exit points for the plaza but chances are, they would have used that particular corner. And even if they’d kept the crowd a yard or two away from the street, some people would still have died.”
Harper only nodded.
“And you don’t know if the mayor would have consented to dragging around more security guards than she already had. Frankly, more men in play probably wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“We’ll see what the autopsy says,” Harper said, locked in his guilt.
The autopsy results were e-mailed to him a quarter of an hour later. The first photo showed the tiny arrow, half the length of a finger with open slits along the side. It had been placed on a white towel and had not yet been washed, so there were streaks of blood on the arrow and smears on the towel. Arrayed next to it were eight carbon points soaked in blood.
“That’s almost impossible,” Kealey said. “The spring mechanism would have to be so sensitive, it would go off if it hit a raindrop.”
“Not much rain in Texas,” Harper muttered. “What on earth would have propelled something like that? A blowpipe?”
They shook their heads, incredulous.
“Whatever it was,” Kealey mused, “the person holding it must have had preternatural muscle control. To launch something that sensitive with a panicking crowd all around, very little time to aim, and such a small target . . . that’s not someone with some military training under his belt. That’s someone who’s been practicing his whole life.”
“And did it in a way that he wasn’t noticed, either,” Harper added with a sigh.
They had spent the last five hours reviewing the feeds from the security cameras over and over. Neither one of them had seen anything suspicious. Rather, they had seen everything suspicious and nothing even remotely conclusive. They’d spent ten minutes repeatedly watching one girl hop the Christmas tree fence just as the mayor was passing by, but she was so obviously trying to get out of the way of the crowd, making no movements that could be read as taking aim . . . At that point they had realized they were burning out and seeing ghosts where there were only bedsheets. The people nearest the mayor at time of death had been detained by the police and questioned, but all they said was that they saw everyone else looking at the mayor after she fell so they ran over to help.
Harper scrolled back to the photograph of the miniscule arrow and its multiple heads. “I hate assassinations,” he grimaced.
“You know who could have done this?” Kealey said. “The archer who took out Yerby. Victor was one of the best, yet he was outmaneuvered.”
“The archer with the size eight shoes,” Harper said, staring at him.
They quickly found the security feed with the view of the tree and the cathedral. Unfortunately the camera was placed across the plaza so figures were small. Again, they watched the young woman with the shoulder bag hop onto the fence and cling to the lamppost. She was distraught, calling out into the crowd. In the moments before the explosion, she had been simply standing by the tree and waiting.
“It’s obvious,” Harper said. “She was waiting for her friend or her boyfriend or whoever, the bomb exploded, she was terrified her person had been caught in the explosion or in the crowd, she stayed as long as she could get herself to stay there, and then she ran.”
Kealey nodded agreement. He watched the tape again. “There’s just no way in hell anyone could shoot with that precision from that position with that much motion going on. Aside from the fact that she had nothing to shoot with.”
“Although it is a security camera feed,” Harper said. “Lousy on detail.”
“And we don’t have a view of every corner of that plaza,” Kealey said. “But I’m still willing to bet that Yerby’s killer and the mayor’s assassin are one and the same.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you,” Harper said, and fell silent to prove it.
“I’m willing to bet my new house on it,” Kealey said.
“Thank you, Ryan,” Harper said, recognizing that Kealey had just offered his foreseeable future to the operation they would rapidly roll out.
“To clarify,” Kealey said, “I want Hernandez.”
“I know you do.” Harper rubbed his eyes.
Damn it, Kealey thought. He had openly stated his objective because somewhere deep down, he’d already known that Harper would say no.
“The DEA will take Hernandez,” Harper said. “We need you on the doctor.”
“The DEA hasn’t done the job so far on Hernandez—” Kealey started.
Harper cut him off. “You have the international experience, Ryan. You take the international job.”
Kealey didn’t argue further, just watched the memorial flowers and candles fill the lawns of City Hall. Finally he stood. “I’ll report to you tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’ve got to pick up my car. You’ll let me know if the doctor leaves the mosque?”
Harper nodded and the battle-scarred old friends shook hands.
“Take the chopper,” Harper said.
Kealey left the building wondering what he was going to tell Ellie about her refuge on the mountain. He could already feel his operational mind hardening over his feelings of disappointment. When people like the mayor’s husband were telling his kids that their mom had been killed, people like Kealey put their feelings to the side.
PART TWO
THE WEAPON
CHAPTER TEN
JEBEL MUSA, SINAI PENINSULA
June 26, 2015
A hot wind swirled a six-foot-high dust devil into life, a pillar of air carrying sand and dead foliag
e across the plain. The airborne flotsam gleamed red in the noon sun. The fast-spinning funnel passed behind the beefy man in khaki shorts before colliding with a steep hillside and exploding.
“There is a great deal of wonder in this land . . . and gold in this ground,” Oxford professor of archaeology Desmond Wesley confided to the high-definition TV camera, conspiratorially tapping his walking staff on the hard, pale plain. Small, rosy pearls of sweat plumped the caked makeup on his balding head. But the greater heat was the one in his eyes, a fire possessed by so many outsiders for this land, its history, its mad prophets and worthy martyrs.
“The gold deposits come as no surprise, since the ancient Land of Midian was renowned for its deposits of precious metals,” Wesley went on. He gestured behind him, to a card table that held a device that looked like a megaphone attached to a small microwave oven, the front of which sported an LCD display. “But we are not here on a prospecting mission, per se. In this broadcast, we will use a molecular frequency generator to scan the strata and distinguish between whatever lumpish indigenous gold lies beneath our feet and any carefully worked trinkets and statues carried by the Children of Israel when they left the servitude of Pharaoh. In that fashion, we hope to be able to find the first actual relics of the Biblical Exodus.”
As the professor spoke, a small figure swathed in a dirty black burnoose appeared on the white-graveled foothills some three hundred meters behind him. Wesley was unaware of the intruder, but a production assistant raised his binoculars to make sure it was just one of the pilgrims or holy men who frequented the holy mountain and not a terrorist. He did not seem to be a threat, though this pilgrim was different from the few others they had spotted since the Archaeology HD jeep caravan arrived the night before. The man was moving quickly, as though he were running from—or to—something. No bother, as long as it wasn’t them. More likely he was hurrying to the Monastery of St. Catherine, which sat behind them in the foothills of Mt. Sinai.
The host noticed the stares of the crew and turned to follow their gaze. He shielded his eyes with his hand.
“Those are the robes of a monk of the monastery,” Wesley commented.
“Maybe a snake bit him or something,” suggested a production assistant.
The veteran camera operator continued to record as an Egyptian bodyguard traveling with the group unshouldered his MISR assault rifle and walked forward cautiously.
“Esmak eh?” the Egyptian shouted.
When the man failed to identify himself, the bodyguard raised the weapon waist high, pointed toward him, and repeated the question.
The newcomer waved his arms over his head and shouted something back. Wesley struggled to hear it but couldn’t quite make out the panting Egyptian.
The bodyguard managed to hear him and shook his head. “Mesh mumk’n!” he yelled with a sneer.
The man, now about fifty meters away, slowed to a trot and held both hands up as though he were surrendering.
Standing behind the camera, the director frowned uncomfortably. “He said something about Allah. That’s not good, is it?”
“It’s all right,” the bodyguard said, relaxing his weapon. “He was simply swearing that what he told me was true.”
“What did he tell you?” Wesley asked.
The bodyguard gestured toward the top of the holy mountain with his weapon. “He said that he has just seen the Gharib Qawee.”
“Did he now?” Wesley said with some astonishment.
“Who’s that?” the director asked.
“The Remarkable Stranger,” Wesley replied.
“And who is that?”
Wesley said, “It’s a Byzantine usage that references Exodus 2:21–22, the Stranger in a Strange Land.”
“I’m confused,” the director said.
Wesley told him, “This fellow insists that he has just seen the prophet Moses.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FORT JACKSON, SOUTH CAROLINA
It didn’t happen often, but infrequently is not never.
The Department of Defense assigned Maj. Amanda Dell to Fort Jackson, home of the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps. While Maj. James Phair was assigned to teach a course in Chaplain Officer Basics to new recruits, she was asked to make a more thorough study of him. It came as Administrative Directive 703 ID—Intelligence Detachment—and cc’ed one Deputy Director Jonathan Harper at the Central Intelligence Agency. The AD gave no reason other than to say that “the cleric,” as Phair was called, was a “subject of interest.” The description told her nothing she hadn’t gleaned from the assignment itself. The fact that the CIA was involved told her that it wasn’t so much Phair as his walkabout among the Iraqi people that was of interest. She had not been instructed to probe him on any specific points, however. That was uncharacteristic of the military. Also to her surprise, Dina Westbrook had not been cc’ed on the AD.
Dell was instructed by the head of psychiatric studies at the Pentagon not to make him her sole patient. They did not want him to feel special, put him on guard. She e-mailed the HOPS that he was already on guard because of his experiences in Iraq and asked if that mattered. They said no. They reiterated that this was simply a six-month project that might be followed by what they called an “Evaluation of Impressions,” which was bureaucratese for “What do you think of him?”
Goals and priorities were still shielded at worst, vague at best. But at least the air-conditioning worked here.
This was session number nine since she arrived early in the spring. Phair had come here in January to give him time to settle in.
“How’s the teaching?” she asked as he settled into the armchair across from her desk. He had been training up-and-coming clerics for two weeks.
“They’re eager and devoted to God and country,” he replied, though his terseness suggested that he had more to say.
“Is that wrong?” she asked.
“No,” he said behind an out-thrust lower lip. “Not conceptually.”
“In practice?”
“I don’t know.”
She was flipping through notes. At least the cleric’s speech patterns and enunciation were getting back to some level of pre-Iraq confidence. “Have you been keeping a journal?”
“That hasn’t been working for me.”
“Why not?”
The lanky Phair leaned into his lap and looked down. “The words just aren’t there.”
“The words or the feelings?”
“Oh, I feel a lot,” he said. “I just can’t seem to isolate one memory or reflection from another.”
“How does this hodgepodge make you feel?”
“The hodgepodge itself is frustrating because I feel like I’m stuck on flypaper,” he said. “I have this sense that I was ‘found’ while I was away and ‘lost’ now, though there wasn’t a day out there that I wasn’t scared.”
“For some people, fear and chaos are a familiar and therefore natural and more comfortable state.”
“If they’d lived with it before,” Phair said. “I hadn’t. I had a very stable life.”
“Which you tossed away when you left your post to minister to the wounded Iraqis.”
Major Phair remembered that he had told the psychologist that he had been intent on ministering to the spiritual needs of the Iraqis. He realized later, after he’d moved to Fort Jackson, that although he had gone to the Iraqis for their aid, it had really been more to assure himself that in the shadow of death, sectarian distinctions were nothing and spirituality was everything. He had to let the wounded men know—and himself, as well—that while men made war over fine religious print, that all vanished as one stood poised to turn himself over to the care of God.
“Let’s talk about how life was simpler before you began your independent work in Iraq,” she suggested.
“My ‘independent work,’ ” he smiled bitterly. “Some of my superiors have called it desertion.”
“Their information is incomplete.”
He gave her a long, searchin
g look. “Are you helping to fill it in?”
“I am not,” she replied. “I’m here for you.”
Phair grinned a little. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There has been so much spin—that’s a new word I’ve learned since I’ve been here. Very useful.” He settled back. “Do you know that one of the commanders in Baghdad wanted to write my work up as a black-ops action?”
“To help you?”
“Are you kidding?” He shook his head. “It would have helped him, added to the tally of proactive maneuvers as opposed to defensive tactics.”
“Do you believe it was desertion?” Major Dell asked.
“No. I was compelled to do what I did out of love of God, not from a lack of patriotism.” He took a long, slow breath and looked at her with searching eyes. “But I will tell you this, Major Dell. My life was very much simpler before I left that hole in the ground.”
Phair had already been on his way to the abandoned government office building, following the wounded Iraqis, when his unit began to withdraw. Intelligence had just been received that the insurgents were using the building as a base. The unit was pulled back and the American forces bombed the building. Since Phair knew the phone lines would be secure inside underground concrete conduits, and help could be summoned—which had been the point of taking the wounded there—Phair hid with several Iraqis in a bomb shelter, where he tended to the bodies and souls of two wounded Sunni fighters. They remained for more than a day, under attack from the air and from artillery fire. A subsequent sweep of the town failed to locate him or his young companions. In the small hours of the following night, Iraqi militiamen who knew of the fortified room dug them out. The assault left the clergyman frightened and disoriented, initially fearful of anyone except those who had gone through it with him. The Iraqis who rescued him would have killed him, but for the interference of the men who saw how he helped their comrades.
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