Brothers In Arms

by Marcus Wynne

  “Yes?” a woman’s voice said. The voice sounded tinny and crackled with static as a cellular phone would.

  “This is Joe from the States,” Youssef said in good English. “I’m looking for Marta from Minnesota.”

  “This is Marta, Joe,” the woman said. “Do you have it?”

  “Yes,” Youssef said. “I can do it for you anywhere, from your location if you like.”

  He listened intently. The woman said nothing for a moment, but there were noises in the background and the babbling of a small child.

  “It’s not necessary,” she said. “Do it and let us know. We have our own means to verify it.”

  “But there are other matters to discuss,” Youssef said as he’d been directed to.

  “Are there?”

  “Yes. There’s your payment, and then the final disposition of the project in Minnesota.”

  “One moment, Joe.”

  The background sounds were lost in more static as though she held her hand over the mouthpiece. He heard the blurred sounds of a short conversation, then she came back on the phone.

  “I’ll come to you,” the woman said. “Where are you?”

  “At the VVV, the tourist information booth, at the Central Train Station.”

  “How will I know you?”

  Youssef thought for a moment. “I’ll be standing beside the phone booths. I have on a white shirt and blue pants, and I have a navy blue courier bag on my shoulder.”

  “I’ll be along shortly.”

  “How will I . . .”

  She hung up the phone and he heard nothing else. He shrugged, and hung the phone back in its cradle. He looked at the crowd under the bright sun, and decided he had time to go into the train station and get a cup of espresso. After he bought his coffee, he took it in a paper cup and brought it back outside, where he stood beside the phone booth in the warmth of the sun.

  Marie Garvais stood on the city side of the canal that separated the Central Train Station from the Old Center, beside the railed bridge, and watched Youssef bin Hassan. She’d taken her time coming to the meeting, riding her bicycle from the canal where the houseboat she and Isabelle lived in was moored, and paused beside the bridge as though she were merely taking a break or enjoying the summer day. But what she was looking for were the signs of surveillance. A top flight team with time to prepare would be nearly invisible, even to her seasoned eyes, but she had sufficient confidence in her ability to determine that it was a reasonable risk to meet the cutout in public. All of her dealings with the people the young man represented had been professional; while this meeting was less so, there was a great deal of money involved, which made it necessary. When she was satisfied, she mounted her plain black bicycle and eased into the steady stream of cyclists crossing the bridge, and rode till she was almost upon the young man. She stopped her bicycle, still astraddle of it, right beside him.

  “Joe?” she said, as though delighted in meeting a friend. “Fancy seeing you here!”

  The Arab smiled nervously. She got off her bicycle, put down the kickstand, and hugged him in greeting. Her hands moved surely over him, checking for weapons.

  “Hello, Marta,” he said. “How nice to see you again.”

  “Nice to see you, Joe!” Marie said. She plucked the courier bag from his shoulder, opened it and looked inside. “You have a gift for me?”

  “Only what’s in my computer,” he said.

  “Then let’s go where we can have a look,” Marie said. She slung the courier bag over her thin but muscular shoulders and pushed her bike along, leading the young man back across the bridge toward the Old Center. “There’s a cyber café nearby that has laptop portals.”

  They walked along in silence for a time, Marie cutting through the crowd, using her bicycle to carve them a path. They came to a cyber café and went in after Marie locked her bike to the rack in front. She got them two cups of coffee while Youssef paid for a card that allowed him to dock his laptop in a portal and access the Internet. He powered up his computer while Marie watched. Once his machine was up, he accessed the communications program and logged onto the Internet. After a few minutes of working the keyboard, he showed her the screen, which contained financial information and the routing address of a bank in Oranjestad, Aruba, in the Dutch Caribbean.

  “Does it look all right?” he said.

  Marie looked over the substantial figures and said, “Yes. It’s fine.”

  “Would you like to . . .”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling girlishly. She pushed the RETURN key and watched the progress bar appear and count off the percentage of the money transfer taking place between two secured accounts. It took only a few brief moments for the transaction to be completed, and now Marie and her partner enjoyed a substantial increase in the funds available in one of their many numbered accounts protected by Dutch privacy laws.

  “That concludes that part of our business,” Youssef said. “But we have some other . . . what about the other man and the woman?”

  Marie shrugged. “The only obstacle is payment.”

  “Money is not a problem . . . when could you do it?”

  “Do you have the same quality of intelligence on those two?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’d need a reasonable amount of time to work it up.”

  “Then I’m told to tell you to consider it a tasking.”

  Marie nodded sharply and said, “Wire the initial amount, then. Same as the last. Do it now, if you’re in a hurry.”

  Youssef nodded and said, “As you wish.”

  It took only a few keystrokes to transfer more money.

  Marie stood and said, “I’ll be in touch the usual way. Check your e-mail often. Do you intend to stay here in Amsterdam?”

  “For a few days. I’ll need to pass on to you what we have, when I get it.”

  “Enjoy your stay. This is a civilized city.”

  “Yes,” said the young terrorist. “It is.”

  Marie locked her bicycle against the rails that separated the sidewalk from the canal, then stepped gingerly down the stairs that led to the deck of their houseboat. She ducked through the low door entranceway and almost stumbled over the small blond girl playing with blocks beside the doorway.

  She knelt by the child and said in a scolding tone, “Come, Ilse. Not so close to the door. Isabelle, you must keep her away from the door.”

  Isabelle came into the front room from the kitchen. She was dressed in a black unitard that clung to her muscled arms and legs, with a blue denim smock worn over it.

  “Give her to me,” Isabelle said. She took the smiling child from Marie and said, “Come here, you naughty girl. What have I told you about playing so close to the door?”

  The little girl laughed and buried her face in Isabelle’s shoulder, and wrapped her arms and legs around the tall woman.

  “Oh, you think you can get away with it by playing one against the other?” Marie said, smiling. “No, you don’t.”

  “So?” Isabelle said, stroking their daughter’s hair.

  “The money went fine,” Marie said, chucking Ilse under the chin and then going into the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee and leaned in the doorway between the kitchen and the front room. “They want us to go back and do the other two.”

  “I thought he was the important one.”

  “They want to be thorough. They paid the initial fee in advance and they promise the same quality of intelligence.”

  “I want to take Ilse to Bruges next week,” Isabelle said. “To see the swans . . .”

  “I don’t think so,” Marie said. “We’ll be traveling. We can take her later, we have the whole summer.”

  “She’s growing so fast, Marie. We need to think of that, too.”

  “We need to make a living, and this goes a long way . . .”

  Isabelle hugged her child and set her down. Ilse sank cross-legged to the floor and began to sort through her blocks. Isabelle watched her, a fond faint
smile on her face, then said, “You’re right, of course. I just hate leaving her. Each time it seems as though she’s grown so.”

  “They do,” Marie said softly. She sipped her coffee and smiled at her lover. “I wonder what she’ll be when she grows up.”

  “Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be . . .” sang Isabelle.

  Ilse looked up in delight and clapped her hands.

  Youssef wandered aimlessly through the cobblestone streets of the Old Center of Amsterdam. He stopped often for coffee, always drinking it alone, and watching as though from a great distance the activities of the young people his own age all around him. He felt lonely, but fought it down with the patience of long practice. He forced himself to think through and recall the tenets of his advanced training as he studied the flow of people in the public places and the residential districts. The concentrations were on the trams and streetcars, the streets busy with bicyclists and pedestrians. His instructors had drilled into him that concentrations made excellent targets, especially those indoor places where air flow could be controlled. He paused beside a wall where a flyer for a concert, the Irish band U2, was plastered. There would be a huge audience.

  An indoor audience.

  But it wasn’t time for target selection. This was an exercise to keep his mind from other things. He made his way back to the inexpensive youth hostel where he kept the rest of his meager gear: a backpack, a sleeping bag, some clothes, a small locked Pelican hard case. A few extra euros had bought him a room to himself, and he went to his room and sat down at the tiny table and set up his laptop. He busied himself composing an e-mail to his handler that he would send from a cyber café later, then set the computer aside and lay back on the thin mattress of the bed and stared at the ceiling.

  He was very lonely.

  Youssef wondered about the blond woman he’d met and wondered if that was her child he’d heard playing in the background. He liked children. It was doubtful that he would ever have any. There were times that the life he’d chosen for himself seemed very hard.

  TORTURE REHABILITATION CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF

  MINNESOTA CAMPUS, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

  Rhaman Uday stood in his private room before a window that looked out over a flourishing garden tended by patients. Uday liked to look at the flowers. He didn’t care much for the thriving vegetable garden, preferring to spend his attention on the flowers. His room gave him a good view, and the staff often found him standing here in front of his window.

  A nurse’s aide opened the door while knocking. “Mr. Uday? Would you like to walk outside?”

  He paused for a moment to consider, then said, “Yes. Walking would be good.”

  He followed, like a large, well-mannered child, in the wake of the small nurse’s aide who steered him through the hallways and out to the garden.

  “See?” she said brightly. “How lovely the flowers are.”

  “Yes,” he said. “See how lovely the flowers are.”

  He stood, his hands limp at his side, looking at the different roses, the impatiens, the marigolds and the daisies, the neat rows of violets and daffodils and other flowers. His shoulders settled, unlocked for a moment from their rigid set, softened by the aroma and the sight of the flowers.

  “The blooming,” he said. “Blooming starts earlier. A longer period followed by the blooming. There is no sad holiday without the blooming. That makes us sad.”

  “Why are you sad, Mr. Uday?” the nurse’s aide said. “It’s a beautiful day. It’s not a sad holiday here.”

  “No,” Uday said. “It will be a sad holiday. Even here.”

  LINDEN HILLS NEIGHBORHOOD,

  MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

  The outdoor seating area in the patio of the Sebastian Joe’s coffee shop is shaded by trees on three sides. The last side faces the sidewalk and the busy street there. Mike Callan and Dale Miller sat in the patio facing the street and people-watched. There was no shortage of things to see: bicyclists fresh from a ride around Lake Harriet, only a few hundred yards away; suntanned couples strolling hand in hand, licking at the ice cream cones Sebastian Joe’s was famous for; and others, like Miller and Callan, just sitting and watching the summertime flow of people.

  “You’re like a shark among the penguins here,” Callan said.

  “Same old Mike,” Dale said.

  “So what do you think about my proposition?”

  Dale touched his finger to the bridge of his Ray-Bans. “I don’t know. I need to think it over, talk with Nina about it.”

  “You that serious?”

  “She’s a factor in everything I do.”

  “I envy you. Margie was my last and final attempt at domesticity. She left me light in the moneybags.”

  “We’re not like that.”

  Callan nodded, and watched a short, trim blond woman jog by. “You’d have full license . . . use who you like. You’d be responsible only to me. I’d sign the checks, and you’d report directly to me.”

  “Like I said, I’ll think about it.”

  “What’s to think about? Is training SWAT cops so exciting? It’s not like you couldn’t use the money. I had a look at your finances . . .”

  Dale laughed.

  Callan said, “Hey, two K a day is nothing to sneer at.”

  Dale took up his tall glass of iced tea and swirled the melting ice around in it. “You’re right, it’s not. But it’s been a long time since I worked a protection detail. I’d need to put together a team. Why don’t you just use one of your off-the-shelf teams instead? Don’t tell me that Kroner-O’Hanrahan doesn’t have VIP protection teams.”

  “You know that we do. But we want you. You’re right here and you’ve already got the best police liaison.”

  “I don’t know if I want to wrap my mind around that kind of problem again.”

  Callan crossed his arms on his chest. “You’ve gotten too used to the easy life, brother. You’re not fooling anybody. You need some edge to be happy.”

  “I like what I’m doing just fine.”

  “Maybe so. Look, will you take a ride with me to look at the principal? The guy is in bad shape, he needs top-shelf people to look after him.”

  Dale watched a bird perch on a branch, then flit away. “How long would we be talking? I couldn’t take an open-ended commitment.”

  Callan turned and leaned toward Dale. “Just a couple of weeks. Till the powers that be decide to keep him here or move him to a secure facility and bring the doctors to him. They’d have moved him by now, but the Center has the best people, and they won’t work offsite. They want control of their environment, and who can blame them? They’re the best in the world at what they do. So you’re looking at just a few weeks.”

  “I could use whoever I wanted?”

  “I’ve got a short list of experienced freelance operators if you need it. But you can use who you like. Maybe you’ve got some local people. Up to you.”

  Dale slouched in his chair and uncrossed his ankles, stretching his legs out. He sipped from his iced tea, and brushed at his shirt where a few drops of condensation dripped from his glass. “Look around you, Mike. This is life. People out enjoying themselves, raising their children, going to work. You ever feel like you’re missing something?”

  “I like what I do,” Callan said.

  “So do I,” Dale said. “All of it.”

  Nina Capushek was thirty-four years old, a brunette athlete with a model’s face, and a respected detective in the Sex Crimes section of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Special Investigations Unit. She and Dale lived together in her lakeside condominium overlooking Lake Harriet, a short two blocks away from the ice-cream parlor Dale used as his hangout. The two of them sat in her front room with its big windows that looked out on the lake and the tree-shaded pedestrian paths there.

  “What do you think I should do?” Dale said.

  “That’s not for me to answer,” she said. “That’s your call. We don’t need the money, but I don’t thin
k you want to do this for just the money anyway. You need engagement, and I don’t think you’re getting what you need from training and riding along on entries. I think you miss having a mission of some kind. You don’t need my permission to do this.”

  “I’m not suggesting that I need your permission,” he said, heat in his voice. “I’m looking for your input.”

  “In that case, I think you’ve already decided to do it. You’re just seeing if you can talk yourself out of it or not. You’d be in charge and you can run it your way and it’s short term, right? Couple of weeks? Why not? We can use the money for a vacation.”

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  “You make it difficult when you get in your own way. Why not do it?”

  “I don’t know if I want to get involved with the G again. Even if they’re hands-off and keeping their distance.”

  “I don’t blame you for that. But it’s short term, you’ve got a trusted friend running it, and it’s a contract—you can walk when you want to.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Of course I am,” she said. She touched his thigh. “Want to go for a run and then get laid, or get laid and then go for a run?”

  LAKE HARRIET, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

  Kroner-O’Hanrahan was a world leader in security, and the management insisted that the corporate staff carry only the latest of state-of-the-art communications equipment. So Mike Callan was able to have a secure cell phone conversation with Ray Dalton, even while Callan was comfortably seated on a sunbathed bench looking over Lake Harriet, admiring the tanned and athletic women passing by.

  “Uday was much more important than we thought,” Callan said. “I’ve been running back and forth between the Minneapolis PD and the security outfit that had the protection contract. The guy that got whacked was carrying Uday’s identification. He’d also had plastic surgery to make him look like Uday.”