by Ken Hansen
“Who knows? This is stupid. You have some metadata on the phone? Where has it been?”
Margolin smiled. “In and out of DC over the past month. Two weeks ago, he was in New York. Three weeks ago in Paris. A month ago in Boston.”
That made Huxley more uncomfortable. With a terrorist question mark on his record, Najwa could only have traveled in the U.S. if he had snuck in. Worse yet, the dates and places seemed to match Huxley’s own travel schedule over the past month. “You track down his calls and emails?”
“No emails either way. Strange thing is, he never received a call on the phone. He only made two—one to your home phone and one to your cell phone. What did he say to you?”
Huxley could feel the heat rising up the back of his neck. Regain control. Time for a frontal assault. He smirked and shook his head slowly. “Not a damn thing. I never knew he called. Look, I don’t know what you are driving at, but it sure smells of a witch hunt. If you think this is evidence of some kind of secret association of this terrorist with me or the CIA, you are trying to find a pot of gold by farting at the end of a fading rainbow. It’s nothing but a fairy tale.”
“Fairy tale?” Margolin said.
“That’s right.” Huxley said. “Obviously, Najwa could have put this information in the phone for many reasons. He knew I had been in the CIA, so he puts in the CIA contact info. He does a few Internet searches and finds some other info, then he follows me around for a few weeks. Big deal.”
“But why would he do that?”
Huxley laughed. “Are you kidding me? Maybe this guy wanted to target me in some way because he hated me so much. Or maybe something else is going on here. I don’t know. But I can tell you this: I don’t know this apparent terrorist outside of official channels, he is not a U.S. asset of any sort to my knowledge, and if he were, you know I couldn’t tell you, and neither my government nor I have had anything to do with this ‘incursion’ into Ramat David. It’s absurd. So let’s knock off the crap and start working together to try to figure out what really happened here, and maybe, just maybe, we will both benefit.”
Captain Yadin smiled broadly.
Huxley shifted in his chair. This asshole thinks I protest too much. Huxley lowered his tone, “So, Major, do you have anything else we can work with?”
Instead, the captain replied, “Why yes, we do, Mr. Huxley. You said your mother’s name was misspelled, is that correct?”
“No, I said that is not my mother’s first name at all.”
“Interesting. Then why would he have included a contacts entry for your mother? Lieutenant.”
The monitor screen switched to a new entry:
Maryam Huxley
home
993-485-0010
mobile
993-534-0120
home address
Apt. 3
3 Wiggin St.
Boston, MA 02113
other address
3971 North St. Joan Way
Kingston, Mass. 01723
Notes
–Forsaken & Deceased
–No? A dozen times at least.
Huxley scanned the entry. He threw his chest out and leaned in. Choosing the strongest tone he could muster, he said, “Well, this is just crap, crap and more crap.” But when he saw “Forsaken & Deceased,” his heart sank into his stomach. He unknowingly reached his left hand onto the top of the pants pocket and touched the outline of the object residing there. His thumb rubbed through the material of his pants over the bumpy center of the object along each of the four smooth, square, columnar surfaces projecting out from it. Forsaken. She might have said that. Damn religion.
Corpuscles bulging, Captain Yadin slammed his palm on the table. “Come on Huxley, are you telling me you don’t recognize the home address?”
Huxley craned his head forward and focused on the address, continuing with his act. “Shit. Excuse me, Captain. Yeah, I think that might be my grandparents’ old address.”
“And your mother’s when she was a child.”
“I suppose.”
“Still just a bunch of crap?” yelled Captain Yadin. The carbuncles on Captain Yadin’s forehead were so red that they threatened to burst and shoot their venom into Huxley’s face.
Huxley said, “It seems someone was trying to get my attention over here and they succeeded, because here I am.”
“Precisely,” Major Margolin interrupted the duel. He glanced quickly at Captain Yadin with a little squint.
Huxley held back a smile. A little truth had slithered out of the look on Margolin’s face. He figured Yadin would not speak again.
Major Margolin’s face relaxed and he looked back at Huxley. “Now, why is that, Mr. Huxley?”
Huxley grimaced, holding back a laugh at the major’s ridiculous good cop ploy. “I have no idea though I plan to find out, and when I do, I may be able to share something with you.”
“Thank you. We would appreciate that. But is there anything you can shed some light on right now?”
“I could only speculate.”
“Please, Mr. Huxley. We’ve heard of your uncanny ability to ferret out terrorists’ plans in their infancy. If you have any thoughts, any thoughts at all, they might help us understand this better and help both of our nations prevent a similar incident or perhaps something worse.”
“Thank you, Major. I would say that Baqir Najwa must have conducted some research on me to find my grandparents’ old address. They have been dead for many years. So why is the other information wrong? Moreover, he had my actual cell number if he called it as you have said, yet he included a fake number in the contacts entry. Was he confused? I doubt it. I suspect he was leaving a cryptic message for me.”
“A message?”
“Yes. I don’t know why, but it is the only theory that makes sense. I’ll check these numbers and addresses and see if they lead to anything. I doubt they will, except as some kind of hidden code we must decipher.”
“But if he wanted to send you a message, why wouldn’t he just call you or send a message to the American Embassy or find some other typical way?”
Huxley leaned his chin on his thumb and forefinger. “A contingency plan. He only wanted the message out if he died.”
“Why?” the major asked.
“Maybe he had been threatened by his fellow terrorists. Maybe they thought he had talked to me at Gitmo. Maybe he didn’t like what they were doing. I don’t know. Maybe he had some other reason for suspecting someone else.” And maybe the message wasn’t from Najwa at all.
“OK, but why in the phone and why in a coded message?”
Huxley shrugged. “He may have thought others would see the phone before he died. Perhaps he thought there was a good chance his body would be found with the phone intact. It probably has nothing to do with this incident at Ramat David, but who knows until we figure it out? How did Najwa die in the incursion?”
“Misfired rocket,” the captain said. “Exploded in his face. The phone was in a pack on his back and wasn’t damaged.”
“Is there anything more that you found on his body or on the iPhone that might give us more clues?”
The major responded, “Quite a few more contact entries, but nothing relating to you. Some are English. Most are Arabic. None seem real. Though we have had the same suspicions, we haven’t been able to decipher any messages or codes.”
“I’ll get our guys working on it right away. Can I get a download of all of the entries?”
“Certainly, but do we have an understanding about sharing on this?”
Huxley nodded. “As long as it goes both ways.”
“Of course.”
“Is there anything else you have uncovered?”
“Nothing much. Najwa was found with this in his pack.” The major gestured to the lieutenant, who produced a double-pointed metal pick with a six-inch wooden handle. A small jewel was centered over an engraved crown, itself centered between two letters in Old English script, “W” and “M”. �
��Not sure how he was planning to use it, if at all, here. It may have been to dig the last few yards into the compound after the rest of the tunnel was destroyed.”
Huxley snapped a picture of the tool. “Was anything else unusual happening on the base the day of the incursion?”
“Just typical ops.”
“May I interview some base personnel.”
“Certainly. The lieutenant will accompany you.”
“Thank you, Major.”
Two hours later a white cab picked Huxley up from the Ramat David Airbase and took him to a nearby hotel just outside of Mizra. While he was a bit disheveled and still a little emotionally shaken, he had weathered the storm. There was just too much garbage in those phone entries, and he was U.S. Homeland Security, after all. Huxley might help them, even if he had had no part in this. If they didn’t trust him, so what? In this business, trust just gets you a knife in the back.
They were letting this play out, following him to see if it led anywhere interesting. It was a method he had employed with a few of his own detainees. The detainee had to believe he was being released because of his “innocence.” While Huxley could not be detained without all hell breaking loose, they had at least feigned some trust in him to find the answer.
Aman had also withheld something vital from him. Two corporals from a computer maintenance unit at Camp Rabin had visited Ramat early that morning. Huxley had uncovered this little gem after he excused himself to the restroom and slipped into the central waiting area for a few minutes. The friendly airman showed him the daily visitor logbook, laughed and told him, “When the air raid siren ended and we returned from the bunkers, those two geeks from Rabin were huddling in the corner under some tables with their hands over their ears. Lucky there wasn’t any direct hit on the facility. Jerks said they had missed reviewing the air raid protocol for the base.”
Huxley smiled. I doubt that. I doubt that very much.
Chapter 4
Huxley leaned his head back and closed his eyes. The morning sun warmed his bare lower legs as they rested on the cast iron table he had dragged to the patio. The image stared at him from the darkness under his eyelids: meaningless phone numbers, his alleged address in a city he had never visited, and strange contact notes. He opened his eyes and glanced again at the Najwa contacts list downloaded to his iPhone, this time switching to the entry on Maryam Huxley.
He took a sip of coffee, Americano. It was like his early days as a code breaker at the CIA. He had always loved mathematics, logic and puzzles. It only made sense that they first recruited him out of Harvard as a code breaker, but he had found the work unsatisfying because he never had a chance to follow up on his discoveries. That was for the operators and investigators, which is why he eventually decided to join their particular fraternity.
Huxley stared at the entry. Baqir Najwa had gotten nearly every fact wrong except his grandparents’ last address. Then there was the entry in the Notes section, which correctly identified his mother’s emotional state before she had shriveled up. Who would know that? Najwa? Had Najwa somehow divined that from Huxley’s response to Najwa’s emotional plea?
“I have a wife. I have children,” Najwa had said, his puffy face streaming with tears. “For Allah’s sake, I have a mother just like you! What would your mother say if she knew you tortured me because of my love of God? I am no guiltier than you. Why don’t you go torture yourself?”
How could that terrorist have known the impact his plea would have on Huxley? How could he have known the emotional torture that was already tearing away at Huxley’s world? It seemed far-fetched, yet the plea had remained, echoing into the prison corridors. It had stopped Najwa’s pain and begun Huxley’s anew. Huxley would never again interrogate detainees for the CIA. Still, how would Najwa have known that? And even if he had known, why would he have put it in a contacts listing?
Huxley sipped slow and deep from his coffee. Maybe “Forsaken” was just part of the message—not intended for him at all—just one of those unlucky happenstances.
He flipped between two address entries:
2K927 Kings Ridge Dr.
Arden, DE 22329
3971 North St. Joan Way
Kingston, Mass. 01723
The two shared one interesting five-letter combination: “kings” in “Kings Ridge Dr.” and “Kingston.” He had checked and found they were both partially real. There was a Kingsridge Rd.—close enough—in Arden, Delaware, as well as a Kingston, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, the addresses were phony.
The problem with the Kingsridge address required no digging. Some rural addresses in the U.S. used alphanumerics, but usually the letter was a cardinal point of the compass that came first to designate the general area of the route. Kingsridge Road was in the city of Arden, not in the countryside. Plus, the zip code was just wrong.
The Kingston address facially appeared more legitimate, but a simple search showed there was no St. Joan Way in Kingston. In fact, Kingston was originally part of Plymouth and settled by Protestant pilgrims in the 1620s. It would be rather strange and beyond ironic if one of its streets were named after a Roman Catholic saint who fought for the French Catholics against the English in the Hundred Years War and was eventually burned at the stake in pre-reformation England for her “heresy.” It also seemed odd that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the entry was not abbreviated with “MA,” the standard two-letter postal abbreviation in use for over sixty years; instead, the address used the old four-letter “Mass.” abbreviation, even though “MA” appeared in the real address of his grandparents. Moreover, the zip code did not exist, though at least it was close to some other zip codes used in other parts of that state.
Huxley took another long sip and scratched the back of his head. Two kings and some alpha-numerics that probably contain some kind of code. But what code? There just didn’t seem to be a starting point.
He thought about the many kings throughout history and mythology, but none of the numbers or other words seemed to work any magic with them. An Internet search showed that three kings were tied to St. Joan of Arc and her battles: Henry VI of England, Philip III of Burgundy, and Charles VII of France. Could something be involved with them? He couldn’t see it. I’m in Israel. What about its kings?
Bruce Springsteen interrupted his examination, singing, “Meet me at Mary’s place. We’re gonna have a party!” The screen on his phone flashed “Kira Sampson, Homeland Security.”
Huxley answered, “Hey Kira, whaddya got?”
A calm, youthful but confident feminine voice responded, “That depends, what do I get for staying this late to find the needles in your latest haystack?”
Huxley chuckled. “I’d rather you find a key than a needle. I never really learned to pick locks with long instruments.”
“I thought you spy boys could break into Fort Knox with a hairpin.”
“Yeah, well, I was never a lofty spy-type, so I guess they never taught me that particular skill. They just sat my butt down in a lonely prison with another lonely, desperate soul and waited to see which one started crying to be let out first.”
“I can’t see you ever crying, Mr. Huxley,” Kira said.
“You’ve never seen me watch the end of Casablanca, have you?”
“No, sir. I didn’t see you as the romantic hero type either.”
“Now that’s my problem,” he answered with a sarcastic tone, “I’m so hopelessly romantic, I got no time to be a hero.” They shared a laugh. “I tell you what,” he continued. “If your little needle ends up getting me in the door on this investigation, I’ll ask the muckety-mucks if they can give you another raise.”
“You know they never give more than one raise a year. Department policy.”
“Well, I didn’t say you’d get one. I just said I’d ask.”
Kira said, “Thanks a bunch, sir. I’ll remember that the next time one of your favorite requests come in when I’m ready to punch out for the day. I’m not sure I deserve a raise
for this one anyway. The terrorist’s digging tool was an archaeologist’s pick, just as you guessed. The crown suggests royalty, so you might think with the English script it originated in some place like England.”
“Nah. I figured something more pretentious in the U.S. We love royal symbols even if we tend to despise monarchical rule. Probably some institution harkening back to colonial days.”
“You got it. You sure you need my help?”
“Always.”
“Well, the ‘W’ and ‘M’ in script are normally overlapped above the crown rather than separated on either side of it. You’ve heard of the College of William and Mary, haven’t you?”
“Of course. It’s one of the oldest well-bred academic institutions in the U.S. Not much of a football team, though.”
“No, but they do have a rather prestigious archaeology department.”
“Great. See if you can track that pick to someone in particular.”
“Done. Professor Jonathan Stirling is on sabbatical in Israel. Apparently he has been digging for a year at Tel Megiddo.”
“Interesting. Hold on.” Huxley searched his iPhone map. “That’s less than 10 miles from Ramat David. Is he still working there?”
“Sure is,” Kira said. “Unless he is one of the dead terrorists.”
“I doubt that. Hard for Aman to confuse an American professor for an Arab, unless—.”
“No, I asked. He is as white bread as his name.”
Huxley asked, “Of whom did you make these small requests in the middle of the night?”
“Well I managed to recall that little funding provision in the Patriot Act. Let’s just say the dean of a college dependent on federal and state grants becomes very attentive when national security is at stake.”
“I don’t doubt it. But that means our professorial digger will have a jump start on a story when I speak with him. The dean probably called him and demanded an explanation right after you hung up.”
