by Dale Brown
“MY-PID will be one of its tools. The unit itself will work on different projects. We want you to support Nuri on Jasmine — he’ll explain that.”
“Support?”
“Yes. The whole idea is to get technology onto the front lines. Whiplash is part of that.”
“Are we testing, or doing?”
“Both. Just like we were at Dreamland. Whiplash and all of us.”
Danny felt comfortable with the parallel to Dreamland, but using a computer system that had no human supervisor sounded impractical. There had been a few automated systems at Dreamland — the robot Ospreys, for example, which were part of his security at the base. But even there, someone on watch was always supervising them, prepared to jump in and override if necessary. Here, there was no supervision.
“I was hoping that we would have more time to build things up, but this situation seems more serious than we thought.”
“So what else is new?” said Danny.
7
CIA Headquarters (Langley)
McLean, Virginia
For an officer who spent most of his time in the field, coming to CIA headquarters was not generally something to look forward to. Even if one wasn’t coming home to be called on the carpet, the stay tended toward the onerous. For one thing, it was almost always associated with paperwork: official reports, expense reports, and briefings. Then there were the routine and not routine lie detector tests, dreaded audits, and the even more dreaded physical and psychological fitness exams.
But perhaps the worst thing that could happen to you at Langley, at least as far as Nuri Lupo was concerned, was being second-guessed. Which he expected was on today’s agenda in bulleted capital letters. He’d taken it as a particularly bad sign when Reid told him to take the weekend off. Reid himself always worked Saturdays, so a routine pummeling could easily have started then. Anything that had to wait for the work week to begin was guaranteed to be onerous indeed.
Not that there was really much to second-guess him on. But of course, that was never the point.
Nuri’s only consolation — and it was thin — was the fact that he had found a restaurant with a cute waitress the night before. She’d flirted a bit, and he figured he’d be eating there a lot if he was stuck here for any length of time.
He drove to the parking lot near the main building, parked in one of the visitor’s slots, and went inside to meet Reid. He was a few minutes early, and after going through the ID and weapons check — guns were frowned on — he decided to head down the hall and grab a coffee at the Starbucks. Along the way he passed the displays of Cold War paraphernalia. Though put out mostly to impress visiting VIPs, Nuri found the old gadgets endlessly fascinating, and lingered on his way back, admiring the miniature bugs in the cases, huge by today’s standards.
Reid, coming down from the other direction, spotted Nuri in the hall. He paused and studied the agent, surprised at how young he looked. He was, in fact, young, though Reid would never hold that against him.
It was nearly impossible for the older man not to draw parallels with officers and agents he’d known in the past, and his mind did so freely in the few seconds that passed before Nuri looked up and saw him waiting at the end of the hall. The young man reminded him of several people, all good men, all dead well before their time. The comparison that came most readily was to Journevale — Reid remembered the agent’s code name, not his Christian name, even as he pictured him.
Journevale was a Filipino who’d been recruited by the British to work in Vietnam and at some point was handed over to the U.S. During the time Reid knew him, he’d lived among the Hmong people in Laos, helping organize guerrilla groups that fought along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
When Reid wanted to check on his status, he had to parachute in via Air America. The flights in rickety airplanes, held together by duct tape and wire, were horribly dangerous; jumping out of the plane at night into the dark jungle wasn’t much of a picnic, either. In the days before GPS satellite locators, it could take hours to find a contact in the jungle; Reid twice failed to meet his agent at the landing zone and had to hike several miles to a backup rendezvous point. But Journevale always managed to meet him, even when the pilots had gone far off course. He was good with languages, and cheery, and best of all, he could cook murderously well. The tribespeople worshipped him.
He’d killed himself in a Bangkok hotel room after the war was lost and his people were slaughtered. It was the honorable thing to do.
“Hey, Bossman,” said Nuri. “Sorry I’m late. I just grabbed a cup of joe. The coffee I’ve been drinking’s lousy. Everybody wants to put sugar in it.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“Where to? Your office?”
“Yours.”
Nuri realized he meant Room 4, the support project headquarters. That was a bit of a surprise.
“I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking about Jasmine,” said Nuri as they got into Reid’s car outside. “I have some ideas on how I can get inside.”
“Why would Luo be so important that he had to be killed?” asked Reid.
The tone in his voice told Nuri that Reid already had a theory. But his supervisor liked the Socratic method of quizzing his underlings before lowering the boom.
“Competitor wants the market to himself.”
“Possible. Other theories?”
“He pissed off the wrong person,” said Nuri. “They got him back.”
“Plausible.”
“Or the Egyptians killed him. They’re becoming more active. They see the rebels as a threat, and want to keep them off balance. You take out Luo, you deprive them of ammo for a few months.”
“Also plausible.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I have no opinion, really. It’s going to be your next step to find out more information. The analysts have finished going over the data,” Reid added, almost as an afterthought. “The tubes could not have been used for rockets.”
“OK. And where are they?”
“That’s the next thing you have to find out.”
Room 4 was located on the opposite end of the campus, but even so, the drive took only a few minutes. There was no parking lot there; they had to park near a larger building about fifty yards away.
Reid turned off the ignition but didn’t get out of the car.
“We’re going to expand your team,” he told Nuri.
“Expand?”
“As I told you when you started. The Whiplash concept calls for more people.”
“Mmmmm,” said Nuri.
“We have a new officer who’s going to be in charge.”
“In charge of me?”
It was a reasonable — more than reasonable — question. Reid ducked it, though. “Not precisely.”
“The operation.”
“The operation remains a CIA mission.”
“So what’s his role?”
“He’ll be in charge of the paramilitary component.”
“I’m paramilitary.”
“In the sense I mean,” said Reid, “they are DOD, and you are CIA.”
“And independent?”
“No one is independent, Nuri. You know that.”
Reid opened the car door. Nuri took a sip of his coffee, then left the cup in the car.
“What’s that mean, exactly?” he asked Reid, catching up to him.
“It means Agency and military people work together. You’ve been there before.”
“Generally, there’s someone specifically in charge.”
“I’m in charge. And Ms. Stockard.”
Politics, thought Nuri. They were probably haggling about the real chain of command above him, each agency trying to protect its turf. Generally that meant no one was in charge, a potentially dangerous situation.
“I think you’ll like the man we’ve chosen. He was in the Air Force. He worked at Dreamland.”
“Air Force? He’s a pilot?”
“No, he was with the orig
inal Whiplash. Danny Freah. He’s a colonel.”
It all fit together for Nuri. Breanna Stockard — a very nice woman, though in his opinion a fish out of water as a manager, far too laid back — was recreating her past glory by surrounding herself with fellow Dreamland alums. Even the name of the project, Whiplash, was the same.
He clamped his mouth shut. There was no sense complaining.
They cleared security quickly. Nuri shivered slightly as they descended — the closed-in stairwell reminded him of the labyrinth beneath the Coliseum.
“Jonathon, good morning,” said Breanna Stockard, who was waiting just beyond the nano wall as they came in. “Mr. Lupo, good to see you again.”
“You can call me Nuri.”
“Nuri, this is Danny Freah. Colonel, Nuri Abaajmed Lupo. He’s been overseas for a while. Still jet-lagged?”
“I’m over it,” said Nuri. Danny was younger than he’d expected.
Ray Rubeo was standing in the corner, arms crossed. “Mr. Lupo, good morning,” he said.
“Hey, Doc.”
“I trust the gear is working satisfactorily?”
“You might make the bulletproof vest thicker.”
“Resistant. It’s resistant, not bulletproof,” said Rubeo in his world-weary voice. “Any thicker and you wouldn’t be able to wear it beneath your clothes.”
“You should work on it.”
Rubeo frowned. “I have a few things to attend to,” he told Breanna. “Text me if you need me.”
“I thought we would begin with an informal briefing on the situation in the Sudan for Colonel Freah,” said Reid after the scientist left. “And then Ms. Stockard and I will expound on what we see as the next step, both for the project, and for Whiplash.”
“Sure,” said Nuri.
“Why don’t we go inside?” suggested Breanna. “We’ll be more comfortable.”
“The Sudan is the incarnation of hell on earth,” started Reid. He’d prepared a brief PowerPoint, which the computer system presented on the cube at the center of the room. “The country has been in and out of revolt forever. The various factions have different grievances and aims. Our interests are not directly tied up in any of them. We were drawn there because of an arms selling network known as Jasmine.”
Some part of Sudan or another had been involved in civil war since before the country gained independence in 1956. The wars had various causes, though the outcome was uniform: the majority of the people suffered, while a few tribal and religious leaders managed to eke out a marginally better existence. Darfur, in the west, had occupied the world’s attention in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Now things were flaring in the eastern borderlands with Ethiopia. The Sudanese government was dominated by Arab-speaking Muslims; the rebels were a mixture of different tribes and ethnic groups. Arabic was their common language; many of the elite and even a number of peasants could manage reasonable English.
Reid turned his attention to the arms dealers who made much of the bloodshed possible. He noted that Jasmine, like many of its brethren, was a loose association of people who moved things around the world, mostly from Africa to Europe. He mentioned the aluminum tubes, and their possible connection to nuclear weapons. Finally he came to Luo’s assassination, a professional job that suggested the game Jasmine was involved in had very high stakes.
Nuri, not necessarily convinced of this, wondered if Reid knew something about the assassin he didn’t. Meg Leary was a pro, which meant that whoever hired her had a reasonably decent amount of money. Nuri thought it was a rival trying to move in, even though he hadn’t seen any evidence of this yet. But it could also be a government.
Had the U.S. hired her? That made no sense to him, but he had to admit it might be a possibility. Reid surely would have told him, or at least hinted more strongly.
Maybe Luo double-crossed the Iranians, who were the source of most of the money the rebels had in the Sudan. Or maybe the Israelis didn’t like him for some reason. They tended to do their own assassinations, but weren’t above outsourcing when it was convenient.
“Luo’s assassination brings us back to square one,” said Reid. “We want to take another look at the rebel groups in the Sudan, and possibly find another way into Jasmine.”
“Why not track the murderer?” asked Danny Freah.
Nuri smiled. He knew he was going to resent working with anyone, but at least this fellow thought like he did.
“That’s impractical,” said Reid. “She’s a professional. It’s unlikely she’ll yield much information.”
“You’re protecting her?” said Danny.
“She wasn’t working for us, Colonel. We don’t know who she was working for. Nuri has some theories.”
Nuri shrugged. “I would have preferred to do it that way, too,” he told Danny. “But it didn’t work out.”
“So what happens now?” Danny asked.
Nuri turned to Reid.
“Originally, Mr. Lupo was able to work in Ethiopia.”
“That won’t work anymore,” said Nuri. “Jasmine used a café in Addis Abba. I bugged the place. But unfortunately, the owner was arrested a few days later and the café was closed down. The smugglers are staying out of there for the most part, because the government’s cracking down.”
“So we’ll have to work directly in the Sudan,” said Reid. “And given the situation there, Nuri could use some protection and backup.”
“Which is where Whiplash comes in,” said Danny.
“That’s exactly the way it’s supposed to work,” said Breanna.
She looked over at Nuri and could tell he was apprehensive. She couldn’t blame him. He’d never worked with Danny and didn’t know what to expect.
“Do you think you can bug the rebels in the Sudan?” she asked him.
“Yeah, of course,” said Nuri. “I’ve already checked the area out.”
He had been through the area earlier. He’d also worked a little with the simulator, which presented 3-D models and conjured situations to practice infiltrating an area. But Nuri had found that real life, at least in the Sudan villages, was much too messy for the computers to model correctly. He’d already decided he wouldn’t bother trying to model the next mission there.
“What’s the goal here?” asked Danny. “How much is it to test MY-PID, this computer thing, and how much to find out what these Jasmine people were doing with the aluminum tubes?”
“Actually, to find out who got the tubes and what they’re doing with them,” said Nuri. “Jasmine was just the conduit.”
“I’d say, Colonel, that the tubes are much more important than the technology at this point,” said Reid. “It’s there to help, nothing more. If the tubes are being used to process nuclear material, that’s an extremely serious situation.”
“Who the hell would process the material in the Sudan?” said Danny.
“That’s exactly what we want to find out,” answered Reid.
* * *
“Relatively painless, wasn’t it?” asked Reid as they drove back to the administration building.
“I guess.”
“I think you and the colonel will get along fine.”
“He thinks he’s in charge,” said Nuri.
“Keep your ego in check, Nuri.”
Nuri frowned and reached for his coffee. It was still warm.
“Do you want some time off?” Reid asked.
“I don’t need it.”
“Good. You’re booked on a flight out to Paris tomorrow night. You can connect from the there to Egypt.”
“Fine.”
Nuri began mentally checking off what he’d have to do. They’d need a cover, first of all. And gear. He could get most of it in Alexandria.
“You’ve done very well, Nuri,” said Reid as he parked. “Luo’s death was not your fault.”
“Thanks.”
“One more thing before you go,” said Reid. “Accounting needs to talk to you about some expenses.”
8
Port Sudan, Sudan
Ten days later
Danny Freah pulled his yellow baseball cap lower as the boat approached the pier. He stepped up toward the bow, holding his bag tightly against his leg as someone jostled against his side. The small ferry had set out hours earlier from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. When it left the dock there, the sun was about at eye level over the water; now it was long gone, sunk into the gray mass of Africa.
The passengers crowding Danny were mostly poor Sudanese returning from work. There were a few pilgrims mixed in, devout Muslims who had performed the hajj, or holy trek, to Mecca. The rest were operators, thieves, and pretenders.
Danny fell firmly into the last camp. His passport and papers declared that he was a doctor of paleontology, a claim backed up with several official letters from the Sudanese and Egyptian governments. Each seal had been bought for five thousand dollars cash, a price high enough for him to consider turning them over to a legitimate paleontologist when his job here was done.
Except few legitimate paleontologists would dare travel to the Sudan.
“How’s the dock look?” Danny muttered.
“Rephrase question,” answered the Voice.
He pushed the earphone in his right ear a little deeper. Though designed specifically for his ears, the plugs didn’t feel very comfortable.
“Are there armed men on the dock?” he asked.
“Affirmative. Six guards within customs area. Additional men beyond the gate. One armored car.”
“Why do they need the armored car?”
“Rephrase question.”
Danny didn’t bother. He had been using the MY-PID “appliance” for several days, but it still felt uncomfortable. Nor had it been particularly useful. He knew where he was going and what to do. The Voice’s contribution to his mission so far had been to tell him how warm it was and how unlikely it was to rain.
He squeezed his eyes together, fighting off fatigue. He’d flown from Cairo via Rome with barely an hour stopover, and from there to Saudi Arabia. Immediately on landing he’d rented a car and driven halfway across the country to the ferry. All told, he’d spent roughly eighteen hours traveling. He’d napped for a little less than four hours during the first flight. Those were the most he’d had in a row since starting his new assignment.
