“Dear God,” Soraya murmured as she began a tour of the crash site, which had already been cordoned off, presumably by Amun’s people. The fuselage was in two main chunks, embedded in the sand and rock like grotesque monuments to an unknown god, but other pieces, violently disjointed from the body, were scattered about in a widening circle, along with one wing, bent in half like a green twig.
“Notice the number of fuselage sections,” Chalthoum said, as he watched the American task force deploy. He pointed as they moved around the periphery of the site. “See here, and here. It’s also clear that the plane broke up in midair, not on impact, which, considering the composition of the ground, caused minimal further damage.”
“So the plane looks more or less the way it did directly after the explosion.”
Chalthoum nodded. “That’s correct.”
Say what you wanted about him, when it came to his trade he was a first-rate practitioner. The trouble was that too often his trade included methods of interrogation and torture that would make even those running Abu Ghraib sick to their stomachs.
“The destruction is terrible,” he said.
He wasn’t kidding. Soraya watched as the forensics team put on plastic suits, slipped shoe coverings on. Kylie, the explosives-sniffing golden Lab, went in first with her handler. Then the task force split in two, the first group heading into the burned-out interior of the plane while the second began its examination of the ripped-open edges in an attempt to determine whether the explosion had been internal or external. Among this latter group was Delia Trane, a friend of Soraya’s and an explosives expert from ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Though Delia was only thirty-four, her abilities were such that she was often on loan to various federal law enforcement agencies desperate for her expertise.
Dogged by Chalthoum, Soraya headed into the circle of death, skirting bits of metal so black and twisted it was impossible to determine what they had once been. Fist-size globs that looked like hail on closer inspection turned out to be plastic parts that had melted down in the fiery conflagration. When she came to a human head, she stopped and crouched down. Almost all the hair and most of the flesh had been scorched to ash, which pocked the partially revealed skull like gooseflesh.
Just beyond, a blackened forearm rose at an angle from the sand, the hand above it like a beckoning flag signifying a land where death ruled absolutely. Soraya was sweating, and not just from the brutal heat. She took a swig of water from a plastic bottle Chalthoum gave her, then proceeded on. Just before the yawning mouth of the fuselage, a team member handed her and Chalthoum plastic suits and shoe coverings that, despite the heat, they put on.
After her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she took off her sunglasses, peered around. The seat rows were canted at a ninety-degree angle; the floor was where the left bulkhead would have been when the jetliner was right-side up and everyone inside had been alive, chatting, laughing, holding hands, or foolishly arguing until the final moment before oblivion. Bodies lay everywhere, some still in their seats, others thrown clear on impact. The explosion had completely disintegrated another section of the aircraft and those in it.
She noticed that wherever a member of the American team went, he or she was shadowed by one of Amun’s people. It would have been comical if it weren’t so sinister. Her companion was clearly determined that the forensics team would not make a move, including relieving themselves in the dizzying heat and fetid stench of the portable latrines, without him knowing about it immediately.
“The lack of humidity works in your favor, of course,” Chalthoum said, “slowing the decomposition of those bodies not incinerated beyond recognition.”
“That will be a blessing to their families.”
“Naturally so. But really, let’s not mince words, you haven’t given much thought to either the passengers or their families. You’re here to find out what happened to the aircraft: mechanical malfunction or an act of extremist terrorism.”
He still had the utterly un-Egyptian knack of cutting directly to the quick. The country was a bureaucratic nightmare; nothing got done, not a single answer was forthcoming until at least fifteen people in seven different divisions were consulted and agreed on it. Soraya debated only a moment as to how to answer. “It would be foolish to pretend otherwise.”
Chalthoum nodded. “Yes, because the world wants to know, needs to know. But my question to you is this: What then?”
A typically astute query, she thought. “I don’t know. What happens then is not up to me.”
She spotted Delia, signaled to her. Her friend nodded, picked her way through the debris and hunched-over workers, with their bright task lamps, to where she and Chalthoum stood just inside the roasting gloom.
“Anything to report?” Soraya said.
“We’re just beginning the prelim stages.” Delia’s pale eyes flicked toward the Egyptian and back to her friend.
“It’s all right,” Soraya assured her. “If you have anything, even if it’s speculation, I need to know.”
“Okay.” Delia’s mother was an aristocratic Colombian from Bogotá, and the daughter carried much of her maternal ancestors’ fiery blood. Her skin was as deep-toned as Soraya’s, but there the similarity ended. She had a plain face and a boyish figure, with blunt-cut hair, strong hands, and a no-nonsense manner that was often interpreted as rudeness. Soraya thought it refreshing; Delia was someone with whom she could let her hair down. “My sense is that it wasn’t a bomb. The explosion very clearly didn’t emanate from the luggage bay.”
“So, what, a mechanical failure?”
“Kylie says no,” Delia said. She meant the dog.
There was that hesitation again, and it made Soraya uneasy. She considered pressing her friend, but then thought better of it. She’d have to find a way to talk to her without Amun hanging on their every word. She nodded, and Delia went back to her work.
“She knows more than she’s telling,” Chalthoum said. “I want to know what’s going on.” When Soraya said nothing, he continued. “Go talk to her. Alone.”
Soraya turned to him. “And then?”
He shrugged. “Report back to me, what else?”
It was very late by the time Moira was ready to leave the office. With a weary hand she switched off CNN, which she’d had on with the volume muted ever since the news of the airliner incident in Egypt broke. The incident unnerved her, as it had many people in the security field. No word on what had really happened—not even from her back-channel, not-for-attribution sources, whose terse responses were so brittle they set her teeth on edge. Meanwhile the press was having a typically monstrous field day—talking heads on TV speculating terrorist attack scenarios. And that didn’t even count the more out-and-out fabrications posing as “the truth they don’t want you to know” on thousands of Internet sites, including the toxic chestnut trotted out since 9/11 that the American government was behind the incident in order to advance its own casus belli, its case for war.
As she took the elevator down to the underground garage, Moira’s mind was in two places at once: here with the new organization she was building and in Bali with Bourne. His grave wounds had made it more difficult to separate herself from him. What had seemed so simple when they’d discussed her future in the pool at the resort now seemed nebulous and vaguely anxiety producing. It wasn’t that she felt the need to take care of him—God knows she would not have made a decent nurse—but that within the eternity when his life had hung in the balance, she’d been forced to reassess her feelings for him. The possibility that he would be snatched from her filled her with dread. At least, she assumed it was dread, since she’d never before felt anything like it: a suffocating blackness that blotted out the sun at noon, the stars at midnight.
Was this love? she wondered. Could love produce this madness that transcended time and space, that caused her heart to expand beyond its known limits, that turned her bones to jelly? How many times during the night had she been roused out of a
shallow and restless sleep, compelled to pad into the bathroom to stare at the reflection in the mirror she did not recognize. It was as if she had been unceremoniously thrust into someone else’s life, a life she neither wanted nor understood.
“Who are you?” she said over and over to that strange reflection. “How did you get here? What is it you want?”
Neither she nor her reflection had answers. In the stillness of the night she wept for the loss of who she had been, in despair of the new and incomprehensible future that had invaded her body like a transfusion.
But in the morning she was herself again: pragmatic, focused, ruthless both in her recruiting and in the stringent rules she set out for her operatives. She made each one swear allegiance to Heartland as if it were a sovereign nation—which in many respects Black River, her main rival, already was.
And yet, the moment the sun fell from the sky, twilight and uncertainty crept through her, and her thoughts returned to Bourne with whom she’d had no contact since she had left Bali three months ago with the body of a dead Australian drifter and the paperwork identifying it as Bourne’s. It was a recurring disease she’d picked up on the island: The thought of his imminent death was enough to cause her to run, and keep running. Except that wherever she went she ended up at the terrifying place where she’d started, at the moment he’d fallen to the ground, at the moment her heart had stopped beating.
The elevator door opened onto the shadow-drenched concrete expanse of the garage, and she stepped out, her car key in her hand. She hated this late-night walk through the almost deserted garage. The smears of oil and gas, the stench of exhaust, the echoes of her heels ringing against the concrete made her feel sad and achingly lonely, as if there was no place in the world she could call home.
There were very few cars left; the parallel white lines painted on the unsealed concrete stretched away from her, ending where she’d parked her car. She heard the cadence of her own strides, saw the movement of her crooked shadow as it passed across one square pillar after another.
She heard a car engine cough to life and came to a halt, standing still, her senses questing for the source. A dove-gray Audi pulled out from behind a pillar, turned on its headlights, and came toward her, gathering speed.
She drew her custom Lady Hawk 9mm from its thigh holster, moved to an expert sharpshooter’s crouch, thumbed off the safety. She was just about to pull the trigger when the passenger’s-side window slid down and the Audi screeched to a halt, rocking on its shocks.
“Moira—!”
She bent her knees more to lower her line of vision.
“Moira, it’s me, Jay!”
Peering inside the Audi, she saw Jay Weston, an operative she’d poached from Hobart, the largest government ODC—overseas defense contractor—six weeks ago.
At once she put up the Lady Hawk, holstered it. “Jesus, Jay, you could’ve gotten yourself killed.”
“I need to see you.”
She squinted. “Well, shit, you could’ve called.”
He shook his head. His face was pinched and tight with unaccustomed tension. “Cell phones are too insecure. I couldn’t take the risk, not with this.”
“Well,” she said, leaning on the window frame, “what’s so important?”
“Not here,” he said, looking around furtively. “Not anywhere where we can be overheard.”
Moira frowned. “Don’t you think you’re being a bit paranoid?”
“Being paranoid is in my job description, isn’t it?”
She nodded; she supposed it was. “All right, how d’you—”
“I need to show you something,” he said, patting a pocket of an expensive-looking sapphire-blue suede jacket slung across the passenger’s seat, then took off toward the ramp up to the street before she had a chance to climb in or even answer him.
She sprinted to her car, starting it up with the remote as she ran. Hauling open the door, she slid behind the wheel, slammed the door shut behind her, and put the car in gear. Jay’s Audi was waiting for her at the top of the ramp. The moment he saw her approach in his rearview mirror, he took off, turning right out of the garage. Moira followed.
Late-night traffic with people returning home from the theater and movies was light, so there was no real reason for Jay to run the lights on P Street, but that’s precisely what he continued to do. Moira put on speed to keep up with him; more than once she barely avoided being clipped by the cross-street traffic, tires squealing, horns blaring angrily.
Three blocks from her building they picked up a cop on a motorcycle. She flashed her high beams at Jay, but either he wasn’t looking or he chose to ignore her because he kept running the red lights. All at once she saw the cop flash by her, heading toward the Audi in front of her.
“Shit,” she muttered, putting on some more speed.
She was thinking of how she was going to explain her operative’s repeated infractions when the cop drew up alongside the Audi. An instant later he’d drawn his service revolver, aimed it squarely at the driver’s window, and pulled the trigger twice in close succession.
The Audi bucked and swerved. Moira had only seconds to avoid slamming into the car, but she was fighting the immoderate speed of her own vehicle. At the periphery of her vision she saw the motorcycle cop peel off and head north at a cross street. The Audi, in the middle of a series of sickening pendulum-like swings, smashed into her, sending her car spinning.
The collision flipped the Audi over like a beetle on its hard, shiny back. Then, as if a monstrous fingertip had flicked it, it continued to roll over, but Moira lost track of it as her car struck a streetlight and careened into a parked car, staving in the offside front fender and door. A blizzard of shattered glass covered her as she was jerked forward, hit the deployed air bag then dizzyingly was slammed back against her seat.
Everything went black.
Climbing carefully over the rows of seat backs was like wading into a sea frozen solid with reef-struck bodies. It was the small broken bodies of the children that were hardest to pass by without heartbreak. Soraya murmured a prayer for each of the souls deprived of the full flight of life.
By the time she reached Delia’s position, she realized that she’d been holding her breath. She let it out now with a small hiss, the acrid odors of burned wiring, synthetic fabrics, and plastics invading her nostrils in full force.
She touched her friend on the shoulder and, mindful of her Egyptian observer, said softly, “Let’s take a walk.”
The observer made to follow them, but stopped at a subtle hand sign from Chalthoum. Outside, the desert light was blinding, even with sunglasses, but the heat was clean, the arid spice of the desert, the murderous sun a welcome respite from the death pit into which they’d both sunk. Coming home to the desert, Soraya thought, was like returning to a longed-for lover: The sand whispered against your skin in intimate caress. In the desert you could see things coming at you. Which was why people like Amun lied, because the desert told the truth, always, in the history it covered and uncovered, in the bones of civilization from which the eternal sand had scoured away all lies. Too much truth, people like Amun believed, was a terrible thing, because it left you nothing to believe in, nothing to live for. She knew she understood him far better than he understood her. He believed otherwise, of course, but that was a useful delusion for him to hold close.
“Delia, what’s really going on?” Soraya asked when they’d plodded some distance away from the al Mokhabarat sentries.
“Nothing I can substantiate at the moment.” She looked around to make sure they were alone. Seeing Chalthoum staring after them, she said, “That man is creeping me out.”
Soraya moved them farther away from the Egyptian’s penetrating gaze. “Don’t worry, he can’t overhear what we say. What’s on your mind?”
“Fucking sun.” Squinting behind her sunglasses, Delia used her hands to shadow her face. “My lips are going to peel off before the night is over.”
Soraya waited w
hile the sun continued to throb in the sky and Delia’s lips continued to burn.
“Fuck it,” Delia said at last. “Five to two the crash wasn’t caused by something inside the aircraft.” She was an inveterate poker player; every situation was a matter of odds. She often transformed nouns into verbs, too. “I instinct a particular explosive.”
“So it was no accident.” Soraya’s blood ran cold. “You ruled out a bomb so, what, an air-to-air missile?”
Delia shrugged. “Could be, but you read the transcript of the flight crew’s last conversation with the tower at Cairo International. They saw no sign of a jet coming up on them.”
“What about from underneath or behind?”
“Sure, but then the radar would’ve picked it up. Besides, according to the copilot, he saw something smaller even than a private jet coming up on them.”
“But only at the last possible instant. The explosion took place before he had time to describe what it was.”
“If you’re right, that leads us toward a ground-to-air missile.”
Delia nodded. “If we get lucky the black box will be intact, and its recorder might tell us more.”
“When?”
“You saw what a mess it is in there. It’s going to take a while to ascertain whether it’s even retrievable.”
Soraya said in the dry, ominous whisper of the hot wind that reshapes the dunes, “A ground-to-air missile would bring an entire universe of very nasty possibilities into play.”
“I know,” Delia said. “Such as the involvement, either complicit or implicit, of the Egyptian government.”
Soraya couldn’t help but turn to look at Chalthoum. “Or al Mokhabarat.”
6
MOIRA AWOKE to the ticking of her mother’s heart. It was as loud as a grandfather clock and it terrified her. For a moment she lay in a fury of darkness, reliving the blur of sound and motion as the paramedics came, took her mother off to the hospital, all seen through a haze of tears. That was the last time she saw her mother alive. She never had a chance to say good-bye; instead, the last words she’d said to her were “I hate your guts. Why don’t you stay out of my life!” All of a sudden her mother was dead. Moira was seventeen.
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